Plus Gallery artist Melissa Furness has curated a group exhibition that will also feature her work for A.I.R. Gallery in NYC, scheduled to open at the end of the month. "A Feminine Contemporary Sublime" features works by Liz Surbeck Biddle, Melissa Furness, Jan Johnson, and Nancy Lasar. The exhibition will run November 30 - December 21st, 2011 with an opening reception on Thursday, December 1st from 6:00 - 9:00pm.
In Western society, the 'sublime' was something historically described by men. The sense of what is "beyond words" manifested itself in art as images of grand landscapes and romantic spectacles of the heroic act. A Feminine Contemporary Sublime articulates a feminine perspective of the sublime understood in the
context of contemporary society, where the grand illusions of male-centric Romanticism have dissipated into a mass of social media and complex communication. In his survey of Documents of Contemporary Art on the Sublime, Simon Morley states that in modern society "the sublime is an experience looking
for a context." The works featured in A Feminine Contemporary Sublime recognize the awe produced by the "sublime experience" as an illusion of misperceived realities. 19th Century Romanticism stressed that "the transcendental ego must strive to detach itself from nature, from society, from the emotions, from the body, and above all from the feminine" (Philip Shaw in The Sublime). With this exhibition, we affirm the failure of the notion of the autonomous self elevated by the imagination's supposed ability to depict the transcendent, and instead rebuild our understanding of the sublime from a "detached" feminine point of view - a view that recognizes the multi-faceted complexity of what we perceive each day in contemporary society as a transcendent force within itself.
This feminine perspective translates the sublime into an "other" reality overwhelmed with information and emotion that ultimately produces a full and even dark contemporary sublime. The works in this exhibition present the viewer with what is familiar, and then exposes them again as a kind of "unknown." As women artists working today in our own "supersensible vocation" (Kant), we are utter multi-taskers, piling one thing upon another and balancing our layered worlds of work, family, home, in addition to navigating social media and virtual communication. This overlapping series of structures at some point breaks down and suspends thought, producing a sublime experience. In this way, the sublime has transformed into multi-layered meanings and forms that are fragmented and contradictory-a kind of super anti-sensible substrate. Here, there is a sense of altered place and unhinged movement, of lines that connect and disconnect, and hints of virtual worlds and information masses, all moving from the internal to the external through a cycle of broken "structures."
A.I.R. Gallery is located at 111 Front Street, #228 in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn.
http://www.airgallery.org
In Western society, the 'sublime' was something historically described by men. The sense of what is "beyond words" manifested itself in art as images of grand landscapes and romantic spectacles of the heroic act. A Feminine Contemporary Sublime articulates a feminine perspective of the sublime understood in the
context of contemporary society, where the grand illusions of male-centric Romanticism have dissipated into a mass of social media and complex communication. In his survey of Documents of Contemporary Art on the Sublime, Simon Morley states that in modern society "the sublime is an experience looking
for a context." The works featured in A Feminine Contemporary Sublime recognize the awe produced by the "sublime experience" as an illusion of misperceived realities. 19th Century Romanticism stressed that "the transcendental ego must strive to detach itself from nature, from society, from the emotions, from the body, and above all from the feminine" (Philip Shaw in The Sublime). With this exhibition, we affirm the failure of the notion of the autonomous self elevated by the imagination's supposed ability to depict the transcendent, and instead rebuild our understanding of the sublime from a "detached" feminine point of view - a view that recognizes the multi-faceted complexity of what we perceive each day in contemporary society as a transcendent force within itself.
This feminine perspective translates the sublime into an "other" reality overwhelmed with information and emotion that ultimately produces a full and even dark contemporary sublime. The works in this exhibition present the viewer with what is familiar, and then exposes them again as a kind of "unknown." As women artists working today in our own "supersensible vocation" (Kant), we are utter multi-taskers, piling one thing upon another and balancing our layered worlds of work, family, home, in addition to navigating social media and virtual communication. This overlapping series of structures at some point breaks down and suspends thought, producing a sublime experience. In this way, the sublime has transformed into multi-layered meanings and forms that are fragmented and contradictory-a kind of super anti-sensible substrate. Here, there is a sense of altered place and unhinged movement, of lines that connect and disconnect, and hints of virtual worlds and information masses, all moving from the internal to the external through a cycle of broken "structures."
A.I.R. Gallery is located at 111 Front Street, #228 in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn.
http://www.airgallery.org
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