Transmission Gallery & Aggregate Space Gallery Present:
A TRAPPED IN YOUR MIND FEELING
Opening Reception
5 April 6-10pm
An exhibition about anxiety organized by Lucy Puls with essay by Heidi De Vries.
Featuring works by: Tim Armstrong, Sarah Bliss, Kirk Crippens, Aida Gamez, Farley Gwazda, Richard Haley, Conrad M. Meyers II, Sandra Ono, Melissa Pokorny, Emma Spertus, and John Tronsor.
With A TRAPPED IN YOUR MIND FEELING, Transmission Gallery and Aggregate Space bring together works that in-vestigate and evoke anxiety. Selected from eleven artists’ practices, each artwork explores different facets of anxiety. In one gallery, Emma Spertus’s photographic reconstruction of a vacated 1980s auto showroom underscores the fickle relationship between economy and consumer desire. Across the street, Farley Gwazda’s layered video and audio allude to the mass of data we have mined from the natural world. Though divergent in media and content, each work evokes anxiety’s attendant feeling of impotence, whether spurred by economic collapse or environmental destruction.
While some works evoke anxiety, others pursue anxiety’s origins. In his diffracted video self-portrait, John Tronsoroffers an interior view of the anxious creative, exploring human anxiety’s birthplace in the ‘monkey’ mind. By combining subterranean photographs with housewares and tenuous armatures, Melissa Pokornylocates anxiety’s origin in liminal spaces and transitional states. Using digital scans of his own body, Conrad M. Meyers II produces other-worldly forms not quite legible as a landscape nor any other familiar space. Meyers’s manipulated images exist in a state between subject and object, referencing the complex tension between technology and human physicality.
As exemplified by Sandra Ono’s subtly corporeal sculptures, anxiety can originate in the body as often as in the mind. Emerging from utilitarian objects, Ono’s forms elicit a squeamishness usually felt when confronting bodily fluids and tissues. In his Portable Hole Proposal, Richard Haleyfurther taxes our bodily empathy by employing his falling torso as an excavating tool. Initially funny for its absurdity, his repetitive gesture quickly transforms into a tense hypnotism. In contrast to Haley’s vicarious masochism, Sarah Bliss’sYou Leave Hereuses the body as a vessel for empathy, and a sort of bleed valve for inexpressible grief. “Unlike the voice, she declares, “the body can never be silenced.”
Inseparably bound to our bodily anxieties are our temporal anxieties; every day, we are reminded of the human time-line. Without overtly depicting any person, Kirk Crippens’s photographic suite, Mary Elizabeth Moves,encapsulates the anxiety surrounding the latter phases of our timeline. The series depicts an elderly person’s displacement from a long occupied home, each image quietly foreshadowing the ultimate displacement: death. Echoing the human times-pan’s brevity, Aida Gamez’s drawings of flattened automobiles showcase yesteryear’s objects of desire stacked in violent repose, apparently defunct before their time.
Barely contained within the confines of their canvases, Tim Armstrong’s ominous drawn forms appear to writhe, almost pleading for space. In a massive street drawing that bridges the exhibition’s two venues, Armstrong’s overtly biological forms come to full expression, connecting the works housed in each gallery. Chosen from artists working locally, nationally, and internationally, the works comprising A TRAPPED IN YOUR MIND FEELING find anxiety as a common thread, a pervasive quotidian fact, an ineffable private hell, and a shared cultural burden.
Opening Reception
5 April 6-10pm
First Friday Event
3 May 5-8pm
Gallery Talk with Exhibiting Artists @ Transmission Gallery
6 April 2-3:30pm
Featherboard Writing Series
4 May 5pm
http://www.aggregatespace.com/
http://www.thetransmissiongallery.com/
