Marcello Dolce, Sessa Englund, Sophie Friedman-Pappas, Audrey Gair, Chris Hanke, Ficus Interfaith, Rindon Johnson, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Sam Shoemaker, Julia Thompson
Banquet
December 14, 2019 - January 18, 2020
“I propose a feast for the eyes, sumptuous, multiplictious, and occasionally disgusting. This is a banquet of works of art that include milk, rice, bread, vegetables, piles of fat, carpets of pollen, sheets of wax or chocolate, shit, urine, blood, and assorted rots. Not all dishes lend themselves to this table; only those servings that are both excessive and incessantly replenished, for this profusion of substance asserts the commodiousness of contemporary appetites, both for pleasure and transgression.”
- Buzz Spector, “A Profusion of Substance,” Artforum (October, 1989).
Banquet brings together ten artists whose work references, investigates, or employs organic substances - such as food, bodily fluids, living/non-living organisms, and raw earth - as material. The digestive cycle is on full display. Works by Chris Hanke and Julia Thompson incorporate powdered sweeteners and juices while Sophie Friedman-Pappas’ and Audrey Gair’s Untitled (Toilet Seat) and Marcello Dolce’s stole(n)cover give us a view of the other end of things. Elsewhere, a raw earthiness is evident. Sessa Englund’s works evoke abstracted organic forms and Rindon Johnson’s rawhide strips are dipped in water and dirt sourced just outside the gallery. Within Sam Shoemaker’s Untitled work lies something very much alive - a fungi of the Gonaderma Lucidum variety. A living, breathing organism that will grow over the course of the exhibition. Ficus Interfaith grinds down waste and loose rock material to develop their terrazzo pieces and, in doing so, calls into question what is natural and what is not. Isabelle Frances McGuire’s circular Ring can be seen as a metaphor for the exhibition as a whole. The enclosed loop of dead flies speaks to our multiple cycles of life and the richness of pleasure and disgust we encounter throughout them.
