This content was published: January 9, 2009. Phone numbers, email addresses, and other information may have changed.
Modern Salvage
Cascade Paragon Arts Gallery
- Guest curator: Derek Franklin
- Artists: Matthew Letzelter, Kim McKenna, Sterling Lawrence, Matthew Green, Jason Adkins, and Jeff Koons
- Dates: January 9 through February 18, 2009
- Hours: 9am-5pm, Monday – Friday
- Opening reception: Friday, January 9, 2009, from 5-8pm
- Guest curator’s talk: Monday, January 26, 4-5pm at Cascade Campus MAHB 222
This exhibition is about the recent trend of contemporary artists referencing late modernist and formalist art within contemporary works of art. For some time, in art and culture, late modernist ideas have been considered “dead, old hat, or a little worn”, with the constant reemergence of these aesthetics and forms it has us questioning their current meaning. In Modern Salvage, both the approaches and intent of these artists are pluralistic and tend not to subscribe to an ideology but rather, question their vitality in new contexts. These geometric and often reductive images are reclaimed and placed into contemporary positions for analysis. This appropriation of formalist aesthetics and proto-ideologies question how these modes of art making exist in the art world and society today.
When DIY television shows teach a viewer how to quickly make geometric paintings that mimics the aesthesis of geometric painting: where does that leave the seminal works of the past? This is contradictory to traditional association of reductive aesthetics to the transcendental, Devine, or timeless classicism. As contemporary artists decipher the unique commercialized modernism of today seen at IKEA, Target, and other department stores, they are not only looking to what this means for the future, but how the ideas of the past are affected. Here, in Modern Salvage, the irony of these images or forms being the privileged link between ideas is questioned. Along with the displacement of nature, the commoditization of a Devine experience, and the simulated transcendental, are examined through these appropriated aesthetics. The artists in this show look into what it means to make formalist artwork in a time of mutating Modernism.
Images from the exhibition
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