GOO
Gregory Fitz, Matt McAuliffe, Megan McCready, Mike Smith, Nate Young
Oct 8, 2009- Nov 5, 2009
St. Paul, MN. September 26, 2009 -- The Denler Art Gallery in St. Paul, Minnesota is pleased to announce Goo, a group exhibit curated by Gallery Director Luke Aleckson and containing work by artists Gregory Fitz, Matt McAuliffe, Megan McCready, Mike Smith and Nate Young.
The work being shown in Goo spans a variety of media, from video to painting to sculpture, but keys around a few core ideas. Central to the exhibit is the idea of pre-verbal knowing: tactile, physical, or intuitive knowledge that precedes language and cognition.
This idea is explored in legendary performance artist Mike Smith's 1978 video Baby Ikki, on display in the exhibit. In the film, Smith adapts an alter-ego who is a toddler, on the verge of being able to speak, but ultimately relying on nonsense words, awkward social interactions and clumsy bodily movements in his attempt to interface with the world and other people (with often hilarious results).
Smith's work gives a nod to Freud's notion of the "oral stage", wherein the world is supposedly understood and appreciated through use of the mouth. And while Smith uses infantilization to discuss the notion of the pre-verbal, the discussion can be extended to include human experience in a much broader sense: transitional states of being, the phenomenology of new experiences, and the anxiety of anticipation.
Smith's brand of infantilization finds interesting parallels in work by a group of his contemporaries in late-70's New York City: the music group Sonic Youth. The title of the exhibit refers to the group's 1990 album, Goo, which similarly explored issues of infantilization, but through the lense of glamour and celebrity (it was their "sellout" album). Kim Gordon's lyrics, in particular, mimic & attack the way in which women are culturally instructed to act in a playful, naive, child-like way. Again, the infantile meets anticipatory desire, but through the domineering influence popular social conventions.
Nate Young's video & sculptural work echoes similar concerns, while inversely exploring hyper-masculinity. In his work on display, the mouth becomes a site of violence and excess. The subject is the uncontrolled consumption of chocolate, an act both disturbing and absurdly jubilant. Through this act Young brings to mind the glamorization of violence in both African-American culture and in the broader popular culture, as well as the glory often given to acts of self-immolation.
Similarly, Megan McCready explores issues of physical consumption, being primarily interested in the status of certain objects and materials as "food," something meant to be consumed. Salivation is a bodily act of pre-verbal anticipation, one that McCready's work often heightens and critically analyzes. She uses materials that can be treated as food, or as not, that can create anticipation & desire while asking us to consider both the ontological significance of food and the politics of how food is defined, produced, and experienced.
Gregory Fitz shares a similar concern with ontological state-change, while using the tropes of sunrise & sunset painting to discuss the limits of image making, representation and abstraction. His large, intensely-colored and borderline-chaotic paintings, created on panels of pink and blue styrofoam, question their own ambiguous status as images while lovingly mining the history of 20th century painting. He does to painting language what Mike Smith does to the verbal: bring it to the edge of cohesion, but then take a step back.
Matt McAuliffe's contribution to the exhibit is a memory foam pillow which the artist has lovingly caressed for dozens of hours. The work confronts the idea of "knowing" on a number of levels. His act of transmitting affection through physical touch, and so knowing the object more closely, and the question of if the object retains any memory of him: his time, his touch, his affection. Knowledge, communication and memory are all in question. How these traces are--or are not--manifested physically. McAuliffe, then, deconstructs physical, pre-verbal knowledge while offering an art object that may be either coldly minimal or genuinely affecting.
The exhibit will be open from Thursday, October 8 to Thursday, November 5, 2009. An opening reception will be held on October 8 from 6:00PM to 8:00PM in the gallery. The event will be free and open to the public.
About the Gallery
The Denler Art Gallery is located on the campus of Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota and is dedicated to showing local, national and international artists of note.
Normal open hours are from 9AM to 4PM, Monday through Friday during the academic year.
For more information, including detailed gallery hours and directions, contact Gallery Director Luke Aleckson at lbaleckson@nwc.edu or see http://art.nwc.edu/denler/about.html
Denler Art Gallery
c/o Northwestern College
3003 Snelling Avenue N
Saint Paul, MN 55113
(651) 286-7560
http://art.nwc.edu/denler
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