NURTUREart Non-Profit, Inc. is pleased to announce the opening of Politics and Other Diversions, curated by Ara Osterweil, on Friday September 12th at the NURTUREart Gallery at 910 Grand Street. Featured artists in the exhibition include David Baumflek, José Luis Cortés, Nicholas Hamilton, Oded Hirsch, Noah Landfield, Daniel Lichtman, and Austin Shull. In our present cultural moment, political discourse is as ubiquitous as it is ineffective. Though the public sphere has never been more saturated with debate, little translates into effective change. Within the increasingly congested blogosphere, ideological sparring has become simply another form of entertainment. Politics & Other Diversions does not claim to resolve the dilemma of how art can meanigfully influence politics, but investigates the mutual failure of art and politics to move beyond diversion. The seven emerging artists and their selected works presented here each ask the viewer to question the nature of political discourse and its limits.

Working in sculpture, installation, video, photography, and painting, these artists present diverse strategies of engagement. They create works that respond to the varied contexts from which their creative practices have developed, mapping the political, geographic, and emotional terrain of areas as diverse as Mexico, Israel, Ireland, and New York. While some works speak directly to the material conditions of power, others reference current issues only obliquely.

David Baumflek’s minimalist sculptures and installations engage an architectonic mode of production for the purpose of his egalitarian vision of artistic and political engagement. Explicitly acknowledging the fallacy of equating object-making with direct political resistance, Baumflek foregrounds the question of individual agency in the public sphere. Referencing the Gordian knot of Alexandrian lure, Baumflek’s Knot suggests the violence implicit in imperial force as well as the difficulty of restoring the body politic once it has been torn asunder.

Israel-born photographer and video artist Oded Hirsch explores the relationship between national political conflicts and the personal traumas they generate. Using his experience as a soldier in Southern Lebanon as a catalyst, Hirsch stages ambiguous rituals, memories and narratives in intimate scenarios that fail to manage the personal and political traumas they evoke.

Working between New York and Mexico in the tradition of Latin American Conceptual Art, José Luis Cortés creates sculptures and site-specific installations that transform mundane objects gleaned from the everyday world into ebullient aesthetic experiences. By subjecting material to arbitrary rules and systems, Cortes celebrates the interface between politics and play in witty objects and unexpected environments.

Daniel Lichtman’s sculpture Type presents two antiquated electronic typewriters facing each other on a simple table. Each un-operated machine mysteriously inscribes a continuous stream of type on a cascading reel of paper. On closer inspection, it becomes obvious that the typewriters are creating a hard copy of a real-time conversation that occurs between unknown, unseen interlocutors in a political chat room. By transforming virtual, anonymous, often un-self-conscious political chatter into a tangible pile of rapidly accumulating detritus, Type calls attention to the futility of purely discursive protest while self-consciously alluding to its own voyeuristic practice.Cortes_Kids

The work of Noah Landfield explores both emotional and environmental instability in which the thrill of explosion is balanced with an awareness of loss. Creating lage-scale abstract landscapes, often figuring stunning images of natural disasters, he then uses collaged photographic elements to disrupt the exquisitely painted surface. Though Landfield’s work implicitly references the role human activity plays in environmental catastrophe, the uncanny beauty of the images suggests that even destruction can be experienced as aesthetic pleasure.

Nicholas Hamilton’s videos and photographs investigate the contemporary impact of the troubles in his native Ireland, often surveying seemingly pristine landscapes upon which only the slightest traces of violence can be detected. A meditation on the entrenched class politics of leisure, Hamilton’s two channel video installation, Clay, has been described by the artist as a “study of the sound of gun shots heard ten years after the cease-fire.”

In the Field Guide to Materiality series, Austin Shull investigates and discloses the complex history of power that underlie the production of seemingly benign artist materials. By conveying information solely through the material being investigated, Shull illuminates the obscure relations between labor, modes of production, and commodities.

Francis Alys has said “Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.” These artists adress the fraught relationship between poetics, politcs, and play, while in their own way, considering the following question: How can we complicate our understanding of politics and art to encompass a wider vision of both? Cognizant of their own futility, these artists nonetheless continue to issue their own challenges and provocations.