Guest curated by Sara Reisman

Including work by: Richard Artschwager, Nina Lola Bachhuber, Jane Benson, Ian Cooper, Anne Deleporte, Karl Erickson, Brendan Fernandes, Sheree Hovsepian, Ohad Meromi, Shana Moulton, Peter Rostovsky, Jenny Salomon, Robert The, Mary A. Valverde, and Roberto Visani.

Momenta Art is pleased to present The Arbitrariness of Signs, a group exhibition of small and large works – paintings, sculptural objects, videos, drawings, collages, and other things – that gather together to pay homage to a moment in the history of painting when realism gave way to abstraction. A confluence of symbolic and post-symbolic artworks, The Arbitrariness of Signs also functions as an experiment in content production, as it is intended to be read as a rebus.

In the representational but surreal realm are works like Jane Benson’s constructivist look at nature, Anne Deleporte’s photo fresco, Karl Erickson’s latch-hook pillows, Shana Moulton’s reflections on the supernatural powers of household objects, and two works from Peter Rostovsky’s series Significant Objects. Nina Lola Bachhuber and Ohad Meromi both push recognizable objects into ambiguous assemblages that, in their wholeness, defy classification while containing the recognizable: horns, eggs, and LPs, to name a few. Pushing familiar forms further into abstraction are works by Richard Artschwager, Brendan Fernandes, Sheree Hovsepian, Jenny Salomon, and Roberto Visani. Artschwager’s is a splattered version of itself, while Hovsepian and Salomon’s contributions involve layering of image towards a holographic effect. Visani and Fernandes – Salomon as well – blur the line between animal and human. To complicate matters, artworks by Ian Cooper and Mary A. Valverde channel the logic of electronic and mathematical networks and systems. The only confirmed word in the rebus will be an artwork by painter and book artist Robert The, bearing a four letter word: THIS.

Viva el Rebus!

The exhibition will be accompanied by a short text by curator Sara Reisman, based on the symbols and signs in the exhibition.