Featuring: Ben Blatt, Ray Caesar, Colin Christian, Sass Christian, Dave Cooper, John Currin, Dame Darcy, Lori Early, Paul Green, Everest Hall, Duncan Hannah, Jocelyn Hobbie, Catherine Howe, James Jean, June Kim, DR. LAKRA, Graham Little, Ruth Marten, Tim Mensching, Ted Mineo, Mel Odom, Christopher Pugliese, Pieter Schoolwerth, Christoph Stienmeyer, Jansson Stegner, Thomas Woodruff

Curated by Thomas Woodruff and Becky Smith.

Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siecle Culture was a curious and esoteric book that appeared in the mid 1980s. Written with a decidedly feminist slant, Mr. Dijkstra explored “the magnificent dreams of intellectual achievement doomed to wither before the tempting presence of women”. With fabulous chapter headings such as: The Cult of Invalidism; the Nymph with the Broken Back; Poison Flowers, Maenads of Decadence; and the Cold Caress of the Sphinx; this book enabled those inclined to swoon in the heady ether of 19th century symbolist imagery. This art seemed so contrary to the tenets of the work of the dry pure abstractionists, steely minimalists, and icy conceptualists who sternly ruled the arts when the book was first published. At the time serious discussions of Symbolist art were rare, as if a plot was hatched to suppress and malign the movement because it did not fit easily into the art historical thrust of modernism.

Idols of Perversity, an exhibition of painting, drawing and sculpture, re-imagines Dijkstra’s book by exploring this loaded cultural phenomenon. Each imagistic work depicts a beautiful young woman or man in ways significantly reminiscent of those painted over a century ago. Is this a sick, kitsch throwback? Is it a neo-conservative reinvestigation of beauty? Is it a post-punk act of aesthetic defiance? The answers to these questions are complex, and we hope, visually rich. At first glance, the art seems strangely familiar, but upon inspection certain distinctions become apparent. The figures depicted do not seem to be the “Zombies of the Male Gaze”. They seem to be more like idealized stand-ins or self-portraits than objects to possess. They also seem devoid of the one-liner jokiness of simple appropriation, these works may actually be sincere.