Moran Bondaroff is pleased to announce Your Face In The Mirror Isn’t Your Face, Similar To Plastic Silverware, a group exhibition curated by Torey Thornton including 12 artists: Steven Baldi, Anna Betbeze, Keltie Ferris, Louise Fishman, Rosy Keyser, Cady Noland, Annie Pearlman, Trevor Shimizu, Odessa Straub, Marisa Takal, Rose Wylie, and Kelly Zutrau.
There are many variations on personal definitions of the term abstraction. The contradiction within these definitions, and the broad spectrum in which works may sit, is interesting. The line between something that is recognizable and that which is less so or not at all can be thin or pushed; further- more, it could be argued that all things are representational, and simultaneously, all things are abstract.
It’s also interesting to see artists who are generally associated with producing mostly representational artworks, or art with recognizable objects or figures within them, drift into constructing abstract work via cropping or other methods that pare down the picture plane in a particular way. This also brings up this idea of language and how subjective it can be. Artists are often placed in categories or pinned to words that they may not readily relate to. These situations can be used to the artist’s advantage or pushed against in order to produce new work or ways of working, but in the end, it’s others who place artwork on a spectrum of terminology or within historical contexts.
I find various social structures fascinating – how they work and/or how they are in many ways destroyed. Subsequently, an interest arrives to introduce collaborations, which also introduces instances to curate works. The overlap of concepts, materials, colors, and scale in artworks is endless, so by focusing on abstraction alone, this exhibition allows the works to converse in closer proximity, further pushing the definition of abstraction.
To flatten the definition is beneficial to healthy production, and without the language given to us, we would possibly enter artworks differently. This show is clearly related to the word abstraction, therefore, it is also most clearly related to that of its opposite. – Torey Thornton, 2016
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