XX:XX
Alex Nguyen-Vo, Commonolithic, Don Edler,
Huntrezz, Molly Surazhsky, Tarik Garrett
Opening: October 31 11am-6pm
On view October 31 - December 20
Hunter Shaw Fine Art presents XX:XX, a group exhibition reflecting on the themes that have shaped 2020. This year has been characterized by contradiction, presenting states of extreme polarity: connection and alienation, acceleration and stagnation, hope and hopelessness. A pervasive cognitive dissonance has emerged as we attempt to make sense of our place at the threshold between the historic and the unprecedented. Society is confronted by the emanant consequences of compounded traumas which have been mostly ignored or repressed for decades: colonialism, capitalism, climate change, white supremacy. It is hard to ignore the intersectional nature of these problems any longer. The pandemic spawned from the confluence of these forces and has brought into sharp focus the dire fact of our interconnectedness at every level: socially, economically, biologically, existentially.
The pensive months of lockdown injected new urgency into the studio practice of many artists. The pain and uncertainty of the pandemic and social uprising have generated artworks which reflect the conditions of a rapidly changing world. Many of the works on view in XX:XX were created in quarantine and have not yet been seen outside of the studio. Although the subject matters respond to specific events of this year, the underlying themes have been present in the past works of the participating artists including interrelated topics such as property law, housing, healthcare, police violence, ecological collapse and systemic racism. Together these works articulate the zeitgeist of 2020: widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.
Throughout XX:XX this dissatisfaction is transmuted into an attitude of defiance and resistance through a diverse range of strategies including painting, textile design, witchcraft, research, graffiti, sculpture, social media, and animation. Across the exhibition, stress is manifest in both content and form with materials pushed to their limits. Yet this strain refuses a collapse into apathy, pointing instead towards breakthrough. This exhibition recognizes that the issues at hand won’t be solved by any single election, but rather through a sustained and multifarious effort to dismantle and transform the systems and institutions that reinforce a toxic and hierarchical worldview. In the words of Octavia Butler, “Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed and, if we’re as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.” *
* Butler, Octavia E. “A World Without Racism,” NPR, September 01, 2001