EUTOPIA

Iva Kinnaird

||

Iva Kinnaird

Iva Kinnaird “Broke, Please Advise” 2018 _ Walmart shopping cart, bricks

 

Iva Kinnaird
A Two Page Paper on Impasse
The Reading Room, Dallas [link]
February 17 – March 24, 2018

Employing absurdist humor, Kinnaird’s exhibition riffs on Camus’ Sisyphus myth. Although many artists experience existential crises in the search for validation and meaning in their work, the timeliness of Kinnaird’s exhibit in context with the past 1year46days0hours44minutes36seconds resonates with a strong Barthesian punctum. The collapsed shopping cart of bricks and the grad-school dartboard reference the despair facing artists mired in mountains of art-school debt combined with the current bleak political culture. Using the metaphor of play, Kinnaird’s “games” provide diversion, while simultaneously pinpointing the futility of said gestures. Yet Camus’ ultimate message is about revolt. And we only have 1049days8hours26minutes24seconds left.

~ Colette Copeland
photos courtesy of the Reading Room, by Kevin Todora

[Read more…]

Diego Leclery

||

Diego Leclery, Me Playing Civilization, Whitney Biennial 2014, by Autumn Ramsey

Diego Leclery, Me Playing Civilization, Whitney Biennial 2014, by Autumn Ramsey

Diego Leclery
Me Playing Civilization
durational performance
Whitney Biennial 2014, New York [link]

Playing Civilization [link] six hours per day during the Whitney Biennial 2014 Leclery huddles under a bridge, freezing while casually building and destroying worlds. Recontextualizing a long-time hobby Leclery’s isolated, time-intensive act of creation has had virtually no impact on the outside world, metaphorically paralleling many studio practices. Typically a means of studio avoidance playing Civilization presents a non-art-commoditized waste of time: a selfishly pure fulfillment of creative desires devoid of art world pressure. Exiled from the galleries the outsider performance futilely besieges the museum and art productivity, while it’s Whitney inclusion sublimates the former act of escapism into suspicious legitimacy.

 

~ Ryder Richards

Photo by Autumn Ramsey [link]
curated by Michelle Grabner [link]

Ian F. Thomas

||

ianthomas-yesterdaystomorrow

Ian F. Thomas
Yesterday’s Tomorrow [2013]
ceramic, acrylic, coal, audio device, hired laborer

Yesterday’s Tomorrow presents an absurdist micro-portrait of Pennsylvania’s socio-environmental dilemma. A paid laborer, for unspecified reasons, rubs coal onto a ceramic hillock for six hours, lulled into numb complacency with generic beer and canary chirping on a digitized loop. The monotonous task completion outweighs need for cognition. This passive apathy infiltrates the gallery as patrons grow bored and increasingly alienated while the mound is gradually destroyed. The work’s clear metaphors spark both environmental/moral disgust and personal empathy, yet more contextually interesting is the painfully prolonged labor of cultural production, which was industriously ignored after an initial viewing.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the artist

[Read more…]