“I was in control, despite the false arrangement”

- Edmund Berrigan, from “Disarming Matter”, 1999.

Larissa Goldston Gallery is pleased to present Disarming Matter, featuring artists from several generations who investigate the raw, absurd, and occasionally embarrassing contents of the imagination. Curated by artists Erica Svec and Zachary Wollard, the exhibition is based on the title poem of Edmund Berrigan’s 1999 book of poetry, Disarming Matter, and sets out to bring together a disparate group of artists whose coarse, wayward visions reveal a direct channel to the innermost realms of human consciousness. The exhibition, including work by Bill Adams, Forrest Bess, Huma Bhabha, Mike Christy, Liz Craft, Gerald Davis, Steve DiBenedetto, Jason Fox, Charles Garabedian, Corin Hewitt, Anna Sew Hoy, Rebecca Morris, Shana Moulton, Kiki Smith and Lucy Stein, will be on view from April 3 through May 3. There will be an opening reception for the artists on Thursday, April 3 from 6pm to 8pm.

Svec and Wollard used the term ”visionary” as a linking factor in their selection of work for this show. However, their concept of “visionary” is not intended to connote the heroic or prophetic, as they feel it has often been inappropriately used to invoke an image of the artist as the self-taught, “primitive” sage. Rather, each piece relies on the artist’s own wide-ranging imagination as its source imagery; while sometimes familiar, the images do not simply reproduce or appropriate realist sources. Each artists’ often disarming and deeply personal visions are evidenced in these works, frequently challenging popular sensibilities of taste and beauty. In the words of the curators, “the powerful results take us on a mind-bending journey – whether we recognize our own experience in the work or not.”

These artists employ a dynamic energy to reinterpret the quotidian, courting absurdist commentary, dark humor, hallucinatory imagery and shifts between form and formlessness. Each artists’ approach defies expectations, and in the process exposes the paradoxes of perception. The direct, complex, yet lo-fidelity approach to every piece in the exhibition produces an inspiring divergence from post-Warholian obsessions with popular culture.