Main Gallery, Gallery Aferro
February 10 – March 16, 2018
Curated by Evonne M. Davis
Opening Reception February 10th 7-10pm @ Gallery Aferro

Case Studies is a unique group exhibition in which artists have been invited to intervene with re-purposed, salvaged museum display cases. The majority of these cases were donated to Gallery Aferro by the George Washington Mt. Vernon Estate Museum, as well as from the New York Historical Society and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Large, elegant, dark wood displays, previously used for a traveling exhibition of objects from George Washington’s life, as well as plexiglass vitrines and pedestals, will be transformed by artists for a contemporary vision.

This exhibition creates a dialogue between museum culture, gallery experimentation, and the impulses and voices of artists. Whether described as cases, pedestals, vitrines, casework, or cabinets, the objects can evoke portability and itinerancy in art and culture, as well as, oddly enough, ideals of what is imagined to be fixed, unchanging, permanent, or authoritative. Ideas about archiving, exposure, cultural access, historical narrative, Americana, Colonialism, “high” and “low” culture, containment, consumption, salvage and recycling, object reparation, looking and how it changes what is looked at, preservation, platform and power, the exotic, and the uses of the past also might come to mind. Artist Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, as well as more recent projects such as Not An Alternative’s Natural History Museum remind us that there are no neutral objects. Which artists generally know better than most. Educators and activity planners are encouraged to contact the gallery to book a free tour of the exhibits for their youth or adult groups.  Artists from across the East Coast will be participating, creating a diverse and unique experience for the viewers.

Participating Artists: Emily Bivens, Marcy Chevali, Kate Eggleston, Tatiana Istomina, Niki Lederer, Ann LePore, Laurie Murphy, Elina Peduzzi, Joanne Ross, James Sham, Sarah Walko, Eleanor White, Juno Zago, Mark Zimmerman

Vox Populi Group Exhibition

Jay Street Art

68 Jay Street

Brooklyn, NY

January 14-February 25, 2018

This is a modest exhibition of twenty some artists, all women, ranging in age from their early twenties to their sixties who have worked directly- or indirectly- to “represent” themselves in their work. The title of the exhibition, The Unreliable Narrator, is a way to suggest that this effort is more complex than it may seem at first.

The notion of the “unreliable narrator,“ a term first coined by the literary critic Wayne C. Booth, comes first from literature, and then from film. An unreliable narrator is not simply a narrator who does not tell the truth—what fictional narrator ever tells the literal truth?  Rather an unreliable narrator is one whose statements are untrue only by the standards of a particular audience who make certain assumptions about “norms and values.” As soon as the concept of the unreliable narrator was introduced into literary theory, there was an immediate  and corresponding emphasis on the distinction between the narrator and the author.  The visual arts have had no such history of separation. And perhaps that is what makes the application of this term—“the unreliable narrator”—so interesting at this moment. There has always been the assumption that the visual artist is presenting an unvarnished “truth.”

Unreliable narrators are almost by definition first-person narrators, and the work presented by the women here confronts issues of self-representation.  They may do this in such a way as to highlight the contention that all representations—and perhaps specifically the representations of women and of the self-- are a set of “unstable” meanings.  Viewers want and possibly need to “trust their eyes,” to believe that the artists are trustworthy in their communications to us. The unreliable artist may therefore be a maverick, a trickster who questions the assertion that “seeing is believing.”  These artists dispute claims to the verifiable, often taking what appears to be a fact of nature and unmasking it as the habit of ideology, or suggesting that every perception is also a distortion, simultaneously both true and untrue, that this paradox is the configuration of a subject.  Here we may have the artist presenting the persona of the “mad” person or the clown, for instance.

Other artists may feel forced into the role of the “braggart” unreliable narrator, beating the marketplace at its own game by presenting in their work images of  women that are saleable, desirable and glamorous, while reserving to themselves the less palatable self-images that are nobody’s business but their own.  One might call this the narrator “unreliable” by virtue of withholding vital information.   The issue arising around this “unreliability” is this:  why should any artist feel obligated to give the public potentially damaging information about their self-esteem?  Who says an artist owes the public—a public dominated now by powerful collectors and their advisors-- the truth, especially when victorious or defeated confrontation, by cunning simulation, even by rejection of the very confines of the term “woman,” or by whatever means they can.  

There may be generational differences in these approaches- in fact that may be the best part of this exhibition- , but a constant remains the sense of the necessity—ostensibly resisted or privately refused—to bow to the demands of a deforming majority viewpoint, be it that of “history” or the “marketplace,” or some other seemingly undeniable “reality,” some power that can feel impossible to displace.  Meanwhile, women survive—by directly staring at themselves, by deceptive self-disparagement, even by means that may elude our current understanding.

This is, as we suggested at the outset,  a modest attempt to engage an enormous issue.  There are no “answers” here. The exhibition attempts only to illustrate various artistic ideas that circulate around how women artists of different ages currently address this subject.  Peter Hopkins