MEAT MARKET gallery celebrates its grand opening with Emergent Behavior, a group exhibition of painting and installation by young D.C. based artists confronting the notions of play, productivity, and intelligent pursuit. Opening reception is Friday, September 29th, 2006, 6-9pm, until October 30th, 2006.
In the context of culturally informed experience, these five artists explore how perception can transform the prescribed everyday qualities of the banal and the benign.
Malia Stenerson's chemical palette of polyethylene and polypropylene plastics come together in strange unison to construct an environment reminiscent of a fun house. Formed of prefabricated household items, the initial exploration into color and texture leads to the perversion of function, accentuating artificial materiality, and the imitative and economical objects of our world--a world being plasticized. The labor and design imbedded in this installation combine psychologies of work and play, suggesting that our sense of play may be subject to larger consumer forces.
A similarly sinister playfulness exists in the paintings of Chad Yencer whose appropriated and monumentalized snapshots from Google Images reveal the abundance of the anonymous, trivialized and eerily accessible image bank on the Internet. With his experience of being a new father Yencer further explores the contemporary child experience and psychology in the face of sensationalized cultural manifestations such as the theme park, with new portraits of imaginary creatures and characters which drive a child's ecstatic fascination, or even fear, and invents their concept of play.
The flimsy toy-like structures in Reuben Breslar's painted paper constructions are initially abstract, almost insignificant, yet the forms in his paintings reveal recognizable imagery of human history, notably, space travel. The enormous and expensive undertaking of space exploration is summed up by shiny gadgets, sublime photographs, and light years. His sombre yet child-like representations of media and cultural establishments provide a quiet look into human potential. Breslar's ongoing fascination with memory, rudiment, and taxonomy is reinvented, in a new diptych, by the gravity of a monumental, frozen mountain landscape collapsing into its own primordial geometry.
Judy Tsai's small and muted egg tempera paintings convey the passing of time and her own playful observations and reflections. Using herself in many of her compositions, she places this bored yet curious figure in an ambiguous environment with room for anomalous happenings. Through crude matchmaking and synthesis, Tsai creates her hybrids of non-owls, and non-marshmallows--vague personifications tied together by their red eyes. These insignificant little creations persist "SIC TRANSIT GLORIA," Latin for glory fades, suggesting every thing's futility and eventual demise.
Appreciation for the small and quiet existences around him is embodied in Sir Christopher II's mixed media installation of an imagined environment inspired by his travels to the Andes, and the Andean beliefs of animal and spiritual transfiguration. This pure experience away from American culture, in the heights of mountains, with its bright, colorful music, hand woven textiles, and animals offers a notion of a carefree existence in contrast to the sociological, scientific and environmental disasters of the ordered world of the west. The beauty and ugliness of the human spirit is craftily and poetically broken down in the manner of folk art and street art sensibilities.
