Superficiality and Superexcrescence

June 27, 2009 - September 12, 2009
Otis Ben Maltz Gallery
Surface & Identity in Recent California Art

Superficiality and Superexcrescence features work by Amy Adler, Rebecca Campbell, Marcelino Gonçalves, Lia Halloran, Salomón Huerta, Elliott Hundley, Kurt Kauper, Elad Lassry, Blue McRight, Joel Morrison, Kori Newkirk, Tia Pulitzer, and Catherine Sullivan. Conceived in opposition to the hard and fast interior/exterior dialectic that cultural theorists like Frederic Jameson have used to contrast the modern and postmodern eras, this exhibition offers a close examination of the work of thirteen LA-based artists who are variously committed to the notion that deep cultural meaning inhabits—as code, nuance, and implication—the outer husk of the people and objects that populate our day-to-day lives, remaking superficiality not as a condition to be resisted, but rather one to be analyzed and manipulated. For these artists, surface and substance are not opposed properties, but equally present. Accordingly, each of these artists focuses on what is latent over what is manifest, on implication over demonstration, and on faint whispers over loud, declarative statements, not with the aim of privileging appearance over essence, but rather to suggest that appearance and essence co-mingle in the surfaces that surround us to generate cultural meaning.

 

Publications

Superficiality and Superexcrescence

January 1, 2009
Editor Elizabeth Pulsinelli
Editor Meg Linton
Publisher Otis College of Art and Design and FOCA
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