CURATORIAL STATEMENT
The exhibition, Revolutions: Revolt, Revelry, Resistance, examines the many ways in which art shapes, frames, and expresses the revolutionary. It surveys the power the arts can hold in shaping societies.
Revolutions brings together artists responding to moments of upheaval and renewal. Spanning a wide range of media and perspectives, these artists remind us not only how change takes root and how artists can lift voices and shape our understanding of historic moments but how artmaking itself is a radical and revolutionary act.
Revolutions are forged in ideas and defined through words. “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” They start as a whisper, a coded utterance that when it takes hold, spreads like wildfire, and ultimately becomes a declaration.
Using Morse code to communicate r-e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n, Laurie Guzda’s painting oscillates between a coded message on a public surface intended for those seeking it out and a topographic view of planted seeds, harbingers of what’s to come.
William Landau’s signature direct work style evokes a protester’s hand-held sign, a lasting expression of hope amongst those who feel a change is coming.
Artists Seth Indigo Carnes and Liz Kolansky remind us that the rights won through revolt are not guaranteed nor can they be assumed. Vigilance is never-ending.
For Seth Indigo Carnes, a commissioned mural based on his Miniluv project in Roscoe, NY in 2023 became the focal point for a debate on the First Amendment and artistic expression. Crazy Wall is an evidentiary installation that documents the intersecting moments along the mural’s, and the subsequent legal battle’s, journey.
In Let’s Dance, Liz Kolansky both historicizes and reminds viewers of the ever-present struggle (and unfulfilled promise) that has shaped the women’s rights movement.
If artmaking can act like a trigger, so too can it be a spark. Lines, shapes, forms in the hands of an artist can be revolutionary when implemented with purpose and force.
Susan Weinthaler’s Spark invites visitors to imagine and realize their own composition. In constant flux, the mutable work requires participation and active engagement to reach its potential rather than offer a fixed depiction or perspective.
The act of celebrating the taboo – in this case, female anatomy- is central to Eileen Bernstein’s marble carving from her Vulva Series. Incorporating it into a familiar shape or vessel with classical art medium as an act of protest and a declaration of presence, refusing to be erased.
The metaphorical power of drawing – that a line holds rather than describes drives Thomas Bosket’s approach. His piece represents the building of a sustained presence, an integrated body, woven together of its inseparable parts; a Movement.
It is unavoidable to investigate historical revolutions without confronting the simultaneous and contradictory themes of joy and carnage. Revolutions are frequently remembered through images of violence, but they are equally shaped by liberation, celebration, and enlightenment.
Recalling the teary-eyed Spanish Rebels, arms stretched, facing the firing squad in Goya’s The Third of May, Douglas Shindler’s take on the 1804 Haitian Revolution shows a victorious Jean-Jacques Dessalines surrounded by liberated slaves, cheering over a pile of ambiguous slave-owner body parts. Unlike Goya’s defeated Spanish rebels, Shindler’s painting depicts revolution from the position of victory. The scene does not soften the violence of liberation, but reaches to match the violence of oppression.
R.P. Coleman’s The Battle of the Greasy Grass, also known as the Battle of Little Bighorn, depicts a scene of visceral carnage through a disarming, cotton candy palette. Majestic stallions are replaced with toy horses and Custer’s horse specifically is substituted with a tank, connecting the genocidal impact of Western Manifest Destiny to the Military Industrial Complex of today.
Shari Drewett’s 1991 Wigstock series presents another form of defiance, one enacted peacefully through joy, performance, and revelry itself. Here, celebration becomes political: a public assertion of presence, freedom, and survival.
While industrial processes have been the catalyst for social revolution, they can also meet resistance. Claudine Luchsinger’s Wallstreet Invasion depicts the hellscape of industrialization, presenting technological progress not as a liberating force but as an invasive and destructive presence.
Both Katie Hovencamp and Richard Klein deconstruct familiar trappings in resistance to the over-militarization and bifurcating political/social landscape.
While intended as a critique of the over-militarization of every aspect of our lives, Katie Hovencamp’s War Hammer brings to mind the symbolic gestures artist Martha Rosler performed in her seminal video work Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), suggesting the inherent strength and resistance that emerges out of such domestic spaces.
Richard Klein’s Left Wing/Right Wing creates a liminal space between halved eagles – national emblems that are held by both ends of the political spectrum, inviting us to consider the shared space amidst ever increasing polarization.
Literally, a revolution is also a cycle. The ancient Greek symbol Ouroboros features a snake or dragon consuming its own tail. Ouroboros reminds us of the literal and poetic connection between beginnings and endings. Christpher Johnson’s cogs evoke that perpetual movement. Suggesting that, if time were a flat circle, we have been here before, and we will be here again.
– Ariel Shanberg & Tanner Simon
