Our culture is like a living breathing organism, it is a lumbering giant, stupid and blind and insatiably hungry. It is so large that it can’t hold itself together; it’s edges twisting, bending, and breaking away. There is something happening to our culture that can’t be seen with the naked eye, there is atomization, undeniably things are coming apart. These parts splinter off only to recombine, pulled back together by the contradictory but unavoidable impulses for both individuality and assimilation. In psychology the Theory of Optimal Distinctiveness describes how all individuals and groups must find a balance of uniqueness and homogeneity, when there is an excess of one, there will inevitably be an increase of the other. Sub-cultures form at these sites of social hemorrhage; they are born of the spontaneous and chaotic energy that surrounds them. The fury and the thunder and the mess organically pull together and finds itself a shape, like a scab on a wound. Sub-cultures are not built by design but grow unexpectedly and unpredictably. However culture is reckless and impatient and will grab at these new ideas and will eat them up, self-cannibalizing to feed its endless hunger. Growing bigger and bigger, it keeps swallowing itself as fast as it is coming undone.

This show aims to address some of the ways artist approach the color, electricity, violence, and promise of this struggle between the individual and the collective mind.

Artists include Martin Kersels, Anna Sew Hoy, Franz West, Jacob Dyrenforth, John Bock, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Isa Genzken, Meredith Danluck, Tony Oursler, Jason Kraus and Julien Bismuth.