An exhibition organized by noted independent curator and critic Dominique Nahas.

The nine artists selected for Inadmissible are Jenna Gribbon, Hung-Chih Peng, Kate Levant, Ken Resseger, Heather Sherman, Eric Schnell, Nathan Skiles, Jacques Louis Vidal and Tobias Zielony. This selection includes a wide mix of artists in various stages of their careers from pre-emerging to emergent to well established. This heterogeneous mix of younger and older artists also incorporates a variety of approaches to the challenge of making unforgettable images and experiences for the viewer.

Inadmissible includes drawings and paintings on paper (Resseger Schnell) mixed media installation and sculpture (Schnell, Skiles) paintings and collage (Gribbon, Sherman, Vidal), print making and photography (Levant, Zielony) as well as video (Peng). These artists use a variety of impulses, sensations, and approaches to image-making in order to define the limits of the unseen, the not known, the unapproachable or the unallowable. The artists both decondition and recondition the state of seeing for the viewer. In order to do this each of the artists in Inadmissible examines the aesthetic and formal protocols through which the canon of post-modern art constantly reasserts itself (and reassures the viewer) such as juxtaposition, displacement, reiteration, metonymy. The artists in this exhibition find their work through a conscious struggle to enter into a visual dialog with themselves and the viewer that appears to adhere to acceptable art practices and approaches while simultaneously creating visual, formal or procedural conditions which offsets (and often upsets) normative and or expected aesthetic readings. There is no formal or thematic coherency between the various works presented in Inadmissible.

Instead of a linear relationship between one work and another this exhibition sets up tangential correspondences and mental relationships between the various art practices in the show. What the artists in Inadmissible have in common is a rare concordance of mind and of clarity and of directness; a mindset which each artist has which arouses highly charged and pleasurable visual experiences. These allow the viewer, in the clearing of his thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, to disallowstereotypical thought patterns or familiar feelings from being generated through conceptual or pathic modes of reception.

Standardized states of mind on the part of the viewer are disallowed and disrupted continually in Inadmissible. They are made untenable whenever, for example, the observer comes into contact with the skewered references to mythic, indigenous or folkloric events in Nathan Skiles’s sculptures, to a scrambling of indexical codes of documentation and surveillance photography in Tobias Zielony’s infrared photography, to the reevaluation of the dialectic between base materialism/ transcendentalism and between vulgarity/ the frivolous in Jacques Louis Vidal’s internet derived photo collages,with the successive imagery that conflates attributes of the divine and the profane in Hung-Chih Peng’s dog videos, or with the eerie silence and aporia which haunt Jenna Gribbon’s exquisitely realized paintings.

Inadmissible sustains the critical lie that rests at the core of each work which has been allowed into the show. In this respect William Blake’s thought “We are led to believe a lie when we see with and not through the eye.” holds particularly true for each artist in Inadmissible. The artists in Inadmissible refer to seemingly arbitrary connections, create unexpected allusions or narratives, and string seemingly unrelated mental or real events together. They spin and extrapolate on considerations or facts to weave a web of circumstances, change our perceptions of presence and of time, and uncover webs of associations that suggest unanticipated, unsavory, unwarranted, unanticipated or untenable states of mind. In so doing the artists in this exhibition create unpredictable visual experiences which induce from each viewer freshly reconditioned responses to the world.