Charlie Horse Gallery presents:

Time Tunnel

Curated by Pali Kashi

Mira Billotte John Brattin Eric Copeland Jeff Davis Spencer Herbst Pali Kashi James Kendi Adam Marnie Keith McCulloch Rich Porter Leif Ritchey Arik Roper Francine Spiegel Ruby Sky Stiler

The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and highest energy particle accelerator, and lies in a tunnel 175 meters beneath the Franco-Swiss border. Physicists hope that the LHC will help answer the most fundamental questions in physics, concerning the basic laws governing the deep structure of space and time. —Brian Greene reporting for The New York Times

“Time Tunnel” proposes a collision of art-making traditions with the uncertainty of time and space. The collective unconscious is infused with ritual and mysticism, and has become dislodged and reinterpreted. The reformed amalgam of paint, wax, clay, sand, and plaster that is presented here are artifacts of this convergence. Totem poles are now made of monster masks, images of prairie women have paint splattered on them, Roman relics are fractured, sand mandalas are blurred, and our spirit animals have been unleashed into the wild.

Mira Billotte is an artist and musician (White Magic) interested in the “Music of the Spheres”; the belief that the planets of the solar system and stars beyond each create a tone in perfect harmony. Mira’s installations and sand mandalas reference transcendental rituals practiced throughout time. John Brattin is a multi-media artist who uses sculpture, drawing, and painting to further inform his personal stories and myths which are eventually made into short films. He is currently working on a western. Eric Copeland’s collages are visual remnants of his pondering of the moon, phallices, faces, and piles of trash. His abstracted compositions use repetition and disjunction much like the music he is known for making. Jeff Davis’s two-dimensional work usually takes on “mysteriously ceremonial and often orgiastic configurations”. His totem-like structures are made from casting rubber halloween masks with multi-colored wax. Spencer Herbst’s dadaist videos are a microscopic look into our everyday surroundings. His magnification of objects strewn about his apartment, salt crystals lying on a countertop, and wood grain in the floorboards are examined so closely that they take on an other-worldly reality. Pali Kashi’s work presents the natural world through the power symbol of the triangle, which grants the viewer a new kind of portal into frozen moments of time. James Kendi’s photographic process begins with asking people what their spirit animal is. He then creates a mask of that animal and photographs his subjects wearing the mask in the animal’s natural environment. Adam Marnie is a mixed media artist interested in the sculptural presentation of images. By splicing traditional still life painting with pornography, he can sharply pierce us with flashes of flesh where we are expecting to see stems and roses. Keith McCulloch’s watercolors meander through a maze-like interior filled with strange yet familiar apparitions. Rich Porter depicts an array of primordial figures, focusing on the unseen molecular network between our bodies and landscape. Leif Ritchey is an archaeologist of the sublime accumulations of his everyday surroundings. The objects he extracts from puddles near a sewer or broken glass hidden under a bush are taken back to his studio to be corralled into his futuristic vision. Arik Roper’s work depicts a fantastical reality filled with mythical warriors, smoky terrain, and decaying skulls. His paintings breathe life into our uncharted history. Ruby Sky Stiler rummages the storage cellar of historical artifacts to incorporate classic iconography into the context of her own relics. Her fragmented reliefs of ancient Greek and Roman imagery question the potency of sculpting the human form. Francine Spiegel’s performance, The Curse of the Century Old Egg, which took place at Deitch Projects this last fall, was a literal mish-mosh of the past and present. The eerie happening gathered six women together in a curious ritual of transformation. The repetition of slime-dumping and paint-slinging turned these prairie-esque women, in ruffled regalia, into monstrous beasts over the course of an hour.

Time Tunnel will be on display from March 5, 2010 – March 17, 2010 Opening reception will be from 7-9 pm on Friday, March 5, 2010 Live Performances by Mike Bones and Luke Roberts