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| | Cardsharper
February 27 - March 14, 2009
Reception: Thursday, March 5, 6 - 8pm
School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “Cardsharper,” a thesis exhibition by students in the MFA Fine Arts Department. Curated by Lauren Ross, interim curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
This exhibition gathers an eclectic mix of sixteen artists who work in painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, video and performance. “Cardsharper”- or “cardsharp”- is a nineteenth-century term for a person who habitually cheats at cards. (Over time, the idiom morphed into today’s more commonly used “card shark.”) While the designation was originally coined as a pejorative, its usage broadened and softened to describe a player with superior skills, or one who uses those talents for entertainment purposes. The playful and mischievous nature of the exhibition’s title suggestively refers to some of the interests shared by this diverse group of artists, including game and role playing, interactivity, humor, rule breaking and just a touch of sleight-of-hand.
Some of the students investigate simultaneous structure building and breaking, as seen in the painterly and graphic canvases of Samuel Adams; the inflating and collapsing sculptures of Trish Tillman; razed buildings abstractly painted by Noa Charuvi; the found and subtly modified objects of Áslaug Friðjónsdóttir;; and deconstructed bodies culled from celebrity photos by Jin Kyoung Bom. Others inspect fraught interpersonal relations, as in Rebecca Goyette’s video showing a woman’s dysfunctional attempts to seduce a male dummy; a pair of videos by Habby Osk in which a handshake between businessmen goes awry and two women face off in a competition for dominance; or Stacy Scibelli’s wearable fabric constructions that envelop and threaten to trap their wearers.
Some works explore physical interaction and desire, such as Tre Chandler’s drawings of men copied from fashion advertisements and pornography; Zoe Chan’s use of optical illusion to create paired words with such contradictory messages as “touch me” and “back up;” Amber Boardman’s drawn animation documenting physical therapy, as well as her audio and video pieces that appropriate messages left on her voice mail, which examine the self through the acknowledgment of others; and Brandon Davey’s sculptures that tease out notions of balance and intimacy between people and objects alike. Other works allow quiet and extended contemplation of the quotidian, such as Paul Limperopulos’ drawings with text and breath which evolve and disappear to explore the passing of time; Kathleen Mallaney’s videos documenting various performances; Alejandro Guzman’s drawings of people and shrines examining the nature of the hybrid; and Curver Thoroddsen’s video in which he mimics an award show acceptance speech to mark the occasion of his thesis presentation and graduation.
Lauren Ross is the interim curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. She has curated over one dozen exhibitions featuring the work of emerging artists, predominantly at White Columns, where she served as director/chief curator from 2001 - 2004. Ross has written for exhibition catalogs published by White Columns, The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as for magazines including Art in America, Art on Paper and the Brooklyn Rail. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Whitney.
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