Camel Art Space is pleased to announce Get on the Block featuring works by Julianne Ahn, Travis LeRoy Southworth, Alex Paik, Nick Paparone, Matt Phillips, and Liz Zanis, curated by Lauren Van Haaften-Schick.

Artist workshops will be held with Liz Zanis, on May 22nd, 3-5pm, and with Travis LeRoy Southworth, on June 12th, 3-5pm.

The works in Get on the Block explore social and self-conscious motivations and anxieties 
surrounding art production and display. Through sincere humor, humility and coy absurdity, these 
artists confront what critic Jan Verwoert has termed “the pressure to perform,” the expectation that artists and cultural producers present only absolute, correct assertions with the “genius-like” promise of positive results. In contrast, these works offer open-ended proposals or temporary conclusions, rendering suspect the desire and criteria for defining success or failure.

Wary of their assumed positions as key-holders to a romantic, isolated world of the studio, the
 artists in the exhibition both embrace and confront the problematic of this rarified space. Jubilance 
and serendipity direct Alex Paik‘s skewed, hyper-saturated geometric cut paper drawings and reliefs, 
nuanced by a pointed fixation on rudimentary elements. A similar upheaval of and reverence for
 formalism is conveyed in Matt Phillips‘ paintings, as picture-making rules are shattered and refracted, 
alluding at once to physics, psychedelia and high modernism.

Autobiographic works consider the conditions for their creation and the artist’s interior life as a similar
 workspace, exposing the labor of production as an intrinsic result of their everyday experience. Liz
 Zanis‘ miniature facsimiles of commonplace objects such as wrapped floral bouquets, train tickets
 and phone books reflect upon and speak to anxieties regarding personal or public perception and exchange. Dirty laundry and the grid appear as equals in a hierarchy of categorical terms in Julianne Ahn‘s labor and time intensive works, referencing the intimate mania of art making and domestic life, the physical minutia of one realm is allowed to populate the other. Emulating the work of work, Travis LeRoy Southworth‘s spit-wad accumulations embody a constant churning of thoughts and desire for action, ruminating at once on where to begin and what could determine an end.

If the idea of the studio distinguishes a place for art-work, or production with the goal of display, then
 viewing one’s labor as play becomes a radical gesture. Subverting the anticipation of the artist as
 authority and reconsidering the definitions of emotional, intellectual and physical boundaries, these works fuse these spaces to propose a more unified and fluid concept of making.

Camel Art Space is an Artist operated exhibition Space with a focus on current issues in art within a not for profit work frame, is a member of Williamsburg Gallery Association and is participating in 2:nd Friday Art Walk.