Emerging Curators: Collateral Damage
October 13 – November 13, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday October 15, 7:00-9:00 PM
Artists’ Talk: Sunday November 12, 1:00 PM
Emerging Curators: Collateral Damage includes the work of seven artists currently living and working in the East Bay: David Burke, Courtney Cerruti, Clint Imboden, Dickson Schneider, James Shefik, and Deborah Vinograd. The work of each artist explores how individual artworks can assume commentary on violence and aggression and also act as the relics of those actions.
Some of the questions raised (and potentially answered) by the exhibition include; what are the agents of aggression, what are the aesthetics of aggression, how and at what point do these ideas and images become desensitized, safe, through popular culture and, perhaps most importantly, what the long term manifestation of these ideas are, and how artists represent this type of trauma. The artwork in this exhibition ranges from aggressively gestured paintings by Dickson Schneider that ape the tradition of German Expressionism, to large scale installation and sculpture by Clint Imboden that plays with the instruments of war; grenades, missiles, and globes delineating past world orders. David Burke’s ink drawings record the aftermath of political decisions, images that appear oil stained, destroyed by heavy industry and densely pockmarked by pollution are still hopeful in their beauty. Following the aftermath of 9/11, Deborah Vinograd did the only thing she knew how to do. She made art. Her brutal, immediate, and physically charged paintings are an implosion of both the menace and the confusion that terrorism engenders. Plump, ridiculous, little bags of meat spew blood within tightly organized environments as animals both embrace and ignore the action in the artwork.
If Deborah Vinograd’s commentary on violence reaches for the poetic through metaphor, Courtney Cerruti’s work is firmly grounded in a contemporary conversation that places beauty within an environment of commodity and appropriation. Pulling her source images from the internet, Cerruti specifically alights upon images that are bruised, weathered and used. Domestic and social violence is made personal but also distanced in this work as the images declare a frequent threatening menace and barely contained insurgency that bubbles just below the radar of seduction that is so appealing in the work.
The phrase “Collateral Damage,” implies damage that is unintended or incidental to the intended outcome. The phrase is prevalently used as a euphemism for civilian casualties of a military action although I am more inclined to believe that we live in a society where this type of trauma occurs almost daily and that the intended outcome of aggression is muddied and almost impossible to discern. The artists in this show mirror directly this concern as it permeates through everyday life. The damage they describe ranges from the catastrophic (Deborah Vinograd’s paintings and David Burkes drawings particularly address the unthinkable) to the ridiculous. Dickson Schneider’s paintings depict the breakdown of privilege. Kept and pampered women cling desperately to a lifestyle that is breaking down faster than their belief can hold onto, as James Shefik strikes at the heart and soul of too many a conflict. Shefik’s understanding of the way in which aesthetics shape meaning across the centuries and imbue reliquary with power underscores our inability to free ourselves from conflicts, perceptions and images that become strengthened across the ages.
Collateral damage occurs if and only we as a society allow it to be “okay” and if we turn a blind eye to the grief and loss that those actions mediate. This exhibition examines the machinery and consequences of those actions in the hope that with greater clarity we can think through the role that art has in reflecting, commenting and insinuating itself into the vocabulary of warfare, aggression and significant loss.
Curated by Jacqueline Cooper