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EN EM Art Space
April 4 - May 15, 2015Info
1714 Broadway (between 17th & 18th)Sacramento, CA 95818 Google Map »
OFF THE GRID Historically, the horizontal and vertical lines of the grid can be traced to the spatial development of ancient Greece, Egypt, and China. Politically, utilized as a normative tool to create order, it also has been conceived at the same time as an autonomous, autotelic, and austere space of modernity, "abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves" (Rosalind Krauss). Formal art education stresses the grid as an integral tool, and within the context of modern art, as an important figure that is all surface--flat and geometric--resisting both nature and narrative. Contemporary art has both extended and/or undermined this conception of the modernist grid as pure visual structure and, at bottom, a masculine construct. Over the years, there have been a wide array of grid-based art exhibitions that have explored the temporal and spatial possibilities of the grid as a minimalist modular structure, and/or as a means to disrupt the production of knowledge and categorization of persons and things. One could argue that in almost every exhibition the grid is featured in at least one work of art and that the grid serves as pictorial support in the making of art. Indeed, the grid as an art historical topic might be exhausted, but I want to argue that, on the contrary, the grid remains central in discussions of power, politics, and aesthetics. While conceding that the grid has become ubiquitous, such that even social media sites including Instagram use the grid as a default mode to "change the way we see the world," there are a number of artists who reject the grid as a pre-existing pattern and/or window onto the world, taking into careful consideration the grid as living and present, fragile and fleeting, and potentially liberating. Off the Grid will present works of art that offer alternative ways of engaging the grid, challenging its discursive and conceptual confines and liberating its structural coordinates through form, color, tone and concept. On another level, the exhibition seeks artists who conceptually promote ways to resist the grid, offering possibilities perhaps to live off the grid. To live "off the grid" is conventionally understood in terms of living outside the system, apart from a disciplined society and/or public utilities. How does art offer an alternative matrix for living in an age of dwindling natural resources? With summer around the corner and the gallery of En Em Art Space, located in Sacramento, CA, a city known for its policies to lower emissions and promote renewable energy alternatives, the exhibition takes advantage of its site-specific location and timing, by attempting to make connections between multiple significations of the grid in order to address the possibilities of resisting or perhaps even rejecting the grid, or unleashing its bold and tensile energy. Works can be any 2D, 3D or time-based mediums including but not limited to: works on paper, prints, books, photography, paintings, sculptures, video and installation. There are no size