Billy Copley Jason Duval Andrew Guenther Jac Lahav Max Razdow James Rosenthal Susan Shaw Jo-Jo Sherrow Ana Wolovick Haeri Yoo

Curated by Cora Cohen

With the end of modernity and the loss of absolute ideals, faced with a sense of fluctuating values, instability, in a context of incessant questioning, reconsideration, how do artists make work?

Configured largely as mental rather than physical spaces, the paintings, drawings, and objects in snippets samplings static draw from our world of popular culture and art history. In these works, images are not lifted from the “real” world as in the collage and ready-made of the 20th century where the cigarette package was cut and pasted down, and the urinal reconvened. Rather, the images, forms, and objects in this exhibition are constructed, painted, drawn, even rendered—some tenderly and with care, others in an off-hand fashion. Familiar graphics and quotidian images are repackaged utilizing various modernist techniques and genres—AbEx, American pop of the sixties, Goth, and German art of the eighties through to the present.

Eccentric, extraneous elements in the guise of erased zones, unfinished parts, and counter-textualities interrupt the graphics, images, and forms first deployed, altering and recontextualizing them, interfering with their meanings. For these artists the visual is not a method with which to distribute already-made statements but the medium of those statements, porous and subject to destabilization. The viewer becomes sensitized to a unity of form and content, an important concern for a time in which work may be thoroughly spirited yet heedless of the power that the unity of form and content projects outside of a staged art world.