Opening reception: Saturday, December 15, 7 pm
Isskustvo Transmagica Provinces Animamina features new work by Sara Everton, Jesse Greenberg, Nick Lenker, and Kate Norton.
Assembled from an open call for Philadelphia artists, without thematic or curatorial specifications, the works which form Isskustvo Transmagica Provinces Animamina appear as though created by fellow inhabitants of some outlying, autonomous network of cannibalistic or otherwise post apocalyptic villages. Departing from the preceeding East Coast / West Coast exhibition at Pageant with the idea of looking at art works in relation to one another as though on a map of intersecting spectra of aesthetic and intention, this group is localized and concentrated.
The incantatory title sums the general interrelationship and characteristics of the art works. Imagery and forms from each of the artists' particular physical and psychic environments are bouncily deconstructed or rather dismembered, and then with a process in which each artist vests great energy and importance, the materials are digested or transformed into supposed evidence of outside presence or larger than human scale force. Isskustvo is the russian word for art, and simultaneously connotes artifice or artificial. Thus we have the supposed presence or supposed actuality of a work of art. The artifice is the conscious impossiblity known to these artists (and others) of actually creating 'transmagic' or immaterial presence through the act of art making. Nonetheless the autonomy of their location on the art making map allows them to disregard that very preclusion. The art in this case is the clear sense of complex visual expression or poetry of wordless interstices in the works. All allude to a type of delicate hybrid of sacred/profane and impossible/possible existence in individual worlds of thought which remain remarkable but obvious in proximity to one another.
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