“X= an Orange Rabbit” -Meret Oppenheim
Featuring: Alicia Adamerovich, Amanda Baldwin, Amie Cunat, Carl D'Alvia, Kirsten Deirup, Dominique Fung, Kathleen Granados, Angela Heisch, Peter LaBier, Zoe Nelson, Tammy Nguyen, Johanna Robinson, Sarah Slappey, Maureen St. Vincent, Emily Weiner, Ryan Wilde, Kalina Winters
Crush Curatorial is delighted to announce surreality, a group exhibition that brings together seventeen artists whose works assert the need for imagination through irresolution. Drawing upon surrealist vocabularies and subversive logic of the present, the participating artists embrace the slippage between humor and horror. Everyday architectures, objects, and body parts serve as starting points that undergo ambiguous transformations, rejecting rational function and form in pursuit of expressions that intervene with cross-purpose. Referencing personal temporalities, cultural fabrications, and the erotics of desire, surreality presents paintings, drawings, and sculptural and mixed media works that form oneiric landscapes of possibility and exchange. The nonsensical, fraught space of the present is examined as one of simultaneous unrest and marvel. Through strategies of veiling and disembodiment, the works on view collapse the space between the familiar and the strange. What are the tropes, ambiguities, blind spots that haunt a Surrealist rhetoric and praxis? scholar Natalya Lusty asks in the introduction of “Surrealism, Feminism and Psychoanalysis.” Engaging with constructed and natural purgatories that vacillate between dream states and lived experience, the artworks that comprise this exhibition reference elements of canonical surrealism while asserting the need for new narratives, textures and perspectives.
