Progeny!
Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
New York, NY
November 17, 2017 – January 6, 2018
Artists: Carlos Amorales & Carlos Aguirre, Julian Hoeber & Ditta Baron Hoeber, Liz Magic Laser & Wendy Osserman, David Levine & Anne-Marie Levine, Nandi Loaf & Jean Patrick Icart-Pierre, Rosalind Nashashibi, Jacolby Satterwhite & Patricia Satterwhite, Daniel Terna & Fred Terna, Hank Willis Thomas & Deborah Willis.
Curated by: David Levine, Prem Krishnamurthy, and Michelle Levy
Assistant Curator: Meghana Karnik
Progeny! takes as its premise the bilateral relationships of influence, genetics, and interdependence within artistic families. Pairing a group of contemporary artists with their artist-parents, the exhibition questions conventional ideas about creative inheritance. What happens when children inspire their parents? When does the need for autonomy outstrip the demands of heredity? How might unresolved dynamics and suppressed feelings become manifest by presenting artists and their artist-parents together? Informed by therapeutic approaches, the exhibition examines emotional responses and conflicting interpretive modes, opening up the possibility for the show itself to function as a site for reconciliations and communication.
Selected with their singular backstories in mind, each pair suggests both conscious and unconscious connections between subject matter, artistic approach, and material palette. Some of these artists are so close that they continue to live and work under the same roof, such as media artist Nandi Loaf, and her father, political painter and teacher Jean Patrick Icart-Pierre; or Frederick Terna, Holocaust survivor and abstract painter, and his adopted son, Daniel Terna, whose photographic work is marked by his father’s history. Other forms of intimacy are expressed through intergenerational quotation, such as in video and performance artist Liz Magic Laser’s reciprocal working relationship with her mother, Wendy Osserman, a noted choreographer and dancer; Hank Willis Thomas, who collaborated with his mother, photographer Deborah Willis; and Jacolby Satterwhite, who incorporates the lyrics and drawings of his mother, Patricia Satterwhite, into the worlds of his animated videos. By contrast, the dissimilarity of works by sculptor Julian Hoeber and his mother, photographer Ditta Baron Hoeber, or David Levine and his mother, poet and artist Anne-Marie Levine, might seem to establish a mutual disavowal, but threads of creative interchange exist beneath the surface. For noted Mexican artist Carlos Amorales and his father, conceptualist Carlos Aguirre, the rejection of paternal influence even led the younger artist to adopt an artistic nom de guerre and contrasting working method.
Presented alongside these generational “diptychs,” the exhibition features the first New York installation of 2017 Turner Prize nominee Rosalind Nashashibi’s recent film, “Vivian’s Garden,” This 30-minute film depicts the tender relationship between daughter-and-mother artist émigrés, Vivian Suter and Elisabeth Wild, whose everyday interactions at their closed compound in Guatemala hint at a complex relationship of interdependence and inspiration.
We Buy Gold!
Galeria Breve
Organized by Notas al Futuro
Mexico City, CDMX
October 14 – November 18, 2017
Photography, among many other things, can be a mode of resistance. Resistance to oblivion and the passing of time (and, implicitly, to death). Resistance to injustice, repression, as well social and sexual norms. For some time now, it has also been a form of resistance against its own limitations as a medium.
Notas al Futuro presents the work of a group of 28 international artists from 12 countries who are responding to a somber political horizon marked by pessimism and uncertainty. Their styles, perspectives, techniques and general approaches span the spectrum of contemporary photographic practices. They are—each in their own way—enacting a dialogue with that precarious future that our generation faces, and, in doing so, both questioning and reinterpreting photography itself.
The ubiquity of images and the attendant crisis of representation generate an explosion of possibilities. While some choose to return to traditional techniques, others dispense completely with the camera and even with the image. Sometimes, the flat paper of the print takes a life of its own and becomes three-dimensional, crawling around the corners of the exhibition space. Some artists prefer to problematize the documentary impulse, freely combining it with staged scenes and the creation of fictitious realms. The act of recording the realities of others takes the added dimension of an interchange of subjectivities and vulnerabilities. Memory, narrative, poetry, trauma, sexual and cultural identities, literary references, formalistic explorations and archive work configure a multiplicity of expressive constellations.
In this general landscape, some artists observe impassively the patterns and traces of chaos and randomness. Some analyze and theorize, while others display their intimacy before the viewer. In the end, they constitute a global polyphonic choir that points towards the possibility of transcending the barriers of nationality, as well as advancing a conversation with contemporary Mexico.
Curated by Sofía Garfías, Verónica Puche & Miguel Winograd.