Opening Jan 23 6-9pm
Show Jan 23 – Feb 27 2015
Special Event: Reading Feb 8 2-4 pm
Artists: Micah Danges, Jamie Diamond, Jeff Fichera, Maria Lynch, Elisabeth Smolarz, Weston Teruya & Andrea Wolf.
Writers: Hossannah Asuncion, Christian Hawkey, Hari Kunzru, Ann Neumann & Uljana Wolf.
Curated by: Elisabeth Smolarz and Jamie Diamond
Radiator Arts is pleased to present cake, dolls, gift bags and other things; a group exhibition of the works of Micah Danges, Jamie Diamond, Jeff Fichera, Maria Lynch, Elisabeth Smolarz, Weston Teruya & Andrea Wolf. Employing a variety of media including photography, painting, sculpture and video, each of the artists in this show examines object-hood and it’s relationship to representation, the uncanny and memory.
Our everyday lives are populated and beautified by objects: we collect, organize and fetishize. They are symbols of our desires, surfaces for our projections and vehicles for our memories. By collaborating, constructing, displacing and documenting, each of the works in the show tempts to subvert our vernacular relationship to objects, collapse the temporary and permanent, past and present narratives and confuse ideas of fact and fiction.
Weston Teruya’s sculptures are based on interviews with members of the New York firefighting community. Utilizing spray paint and drawing media on paper, Teruya recreates everyday objects based on these interviews. The final work: a reconstructed cake, sink and an air tank, become symbols of the history of activism which enabled women to join the department in 1982 and continued struggles for more equitable representation today.
In Nine Months of Reborning, Jamie Diamond photographs sculptures of fictional children. The series documents her entry into the Reborn community over nine months and the making of nine dolls. Each hyper-real doll is photographed on completion before being put up for adoption on eBay and recirculated within the community.
Maria Lynch’s sculptural works are psychologically charged and investigate child’s play, fear,and memory. Lynch’s colorful stuffed animal like sculptures engage with a fantasy world where figures exist on the border of abstraction and are suspended like fetishized shrines.
Elisabeth Smolarz utilizes objects as portals to memory by collaborating with individuals to create shrine like installations of their own objects in their home environments. Smolarz’s photographs are loaded with personal meaning and codes. The installation of their precious objects tells the story of each individual, and forms a series of intricate non-concrete portraits.
Andrea Wolf’s video in which a photograph is slowly decomposed through a pixel sorting algorithmic manipulation process investigates our relationship to images, memory and time. Symbolic for the tension between remembering and forgetting the video shows a found photograph as an object which was produced in order to index a lived experience, which functions as a dynamic trigger of perception through which remembrance is activated.
Jeff Fichera’s photo realistic paintings inspire questions of expectation and desire. His works depict the beauty and fascination of detritus, banal objects and gift packaging, immortalizing each object’s unique narrative through the dents and dings in what was once a pristine and structured surface.
In, 2 Towels, Micah Danges’s documents two isolated objects, towel and sand, into one single photographic frame, creating a disorientating tromp l’oeil effect. Danges manipulates photographs beyond the two-dimensional print creating a visceral relationship with the final sculptural image and the viewer.
About the Curators: Jamie Diamond and Elisabeth Smolarz are visual artist based in New York.
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