Event
Opening the Trap: Diedrick Brackens, Amir H. Fallah, Genevieve Gaignard, Jiha Moon and Lana WilliamsPost an Event »
Interface Gallery is pleased to present Opening the Trap, a group exhibition featuring work by Diedrick Brackens, Amir H. Fallah, Genevieve Gaignard, Jiha Moon and Lana Williams. The artists in this show all explore the complexity and fluidity of identity in a variety of ways, often using the hybridity of their styles as a metaphor for this complexity. Using props and costumes, Gaignard's photographic self-representations explore intersections of race, femininity and class. In differing ways, Moon and Fallah explore identity through the lens of immigration, global movement, and assimilation of personal and cultural influences. Meanwhile, Brackens and Williams use abstraction as a metaphor for bodies that don’t conform to singular notions. While the artists touch upon personal and collective struggles, their work is also celebratory and even playful – from the campy style of Gaignard’s selfie-based photos to the humorous collision of references in Moon’s work, which range from Korean temple painting to anime and internet emoticons. The title for this exhibition comes from Thomas McEvilley’s essay of the same name in which he asserts the need for exhibitions that recognize “that categories and criteria have no innate validity – only the validity that is projected upon them – and thus that their transgression can be an opening into freedom.” Collectively, the works in this exhibition represent this kind of opening by proposing “an idea of the self that is relative, multi-faceted, and shifting.”