Work by Jesse Bransford, Amy Gartrell, Jonah Groeneboer, Dave McDermott, Bjørn Melhus, Bruno Peinado, Alejandro Almanza Pereda, Mariah Robertson, Andrew Sexton, David Benjamin Sherry, Kant Smith, and Hannah Whitaker

André Schlechtriem Contemporary is pleased to present Sonata for Executioner and Various Young Women, curated by Nicholas Weist. This group show includes drawing, sculpture, photography, and video relating to ideas of excess, vainglory, and the future of yesteryear.

Departing from the camp sci fi classics of the late sixties and early seventies, Sonata for Executioner and Various Young Women explores a fictive space of psychic and physical over-indulgences in the distant future. However the works included are imperfect articles—the sheen of the 22nd, or 26th or 28th, century belied by traces of handicraft. Tackling these ideas from multiple vantages, works in Sonata for Executioner and Various Young Women are by turns cheeky, touching, and interrogative. Jonah Groeneboer’s Untitled [II] collapses the fourth dimension with the third, pointing to the limitations of the human experience through his transcendent drawing. Kant Smith appropriates the works of American “masters” (in this case Frank Stella) transforming them into luminescent painting/sculptures. Mariah Robertson and David Benjamin Sherry’s photographs evoke otherworldly sensations through out-dated darkroom techniques. And Alejandro Almanza Pereada’s seemingly impossible sculptures support hunks of concrete with delicate pieces of glass.

The title of the show is drawn from cult classic Barbarella: when Jane Fonda as Barbarella is forced into the evil Duran Duran’s Excessive Machine to be pleasured to death, Duran Duran plays his Sonata for Exectutioner and Various Young Women. Barbarella, experienced in the ways of love, overtaxes the machine and it is destroyed.