INdiVISIBLE CITIES
Curated by Jason Paradis
Bill Maynes Gallery, NYC
January 24 – February 21, 2004
Reception: Saturday, January 31, 6-8pm
Bill Maynes Gallery presents a group show based on the novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. In this collection of brief passages, young Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan the cities he encountered while exploring the emperor’s realm. As the stories unfold, fact and fiction intertwine. The Kingdom becomes not necessarily what is, but what Khan wants it to be. It is a time where his endless lands, once full of wonders, have fallen to ruin and corruption. Embellishments add interest, importance, and effectively blur the panoptic view of the real world. At what point does the embellishment replace fact in both the creator’s mind and what becomes known as history?
INdiVISIBLE CITIES explores the intersection of reality and fantasy as a metaphor and means of creating works of art. An accumulation of experiences is presented to us through the eyes of the traveler after an expedition or in anticipation of a journey to come. The artists in this show demonstrate a willingness to embellish and to recount a tale. Each artist takes elements from the familiar world then restructures and re-describes them in terms of their experience – or the perception of that experience obscured by some desire. All of the works speak of distances. These points could be so great, remote, or fantastic that they only exist through the artist’s telling. However, they could be obtainable destinations with their representation skewed via the artist’s path or memory of that place. Sometimes the path is all that remains and the destination is secondary to the adventure that took them there. Whatever the result, we see an indivisible tangle of expectation, truth, and imagination.
The artists include Ilan Averbuch, Spencer Finch, Seth Michael Forman, Susanne Kühn, Marco Maggi, Michael Mahnke, Todd McCollister, Lordy Rodriquez, Katrin Sigurdardottir, Fred Tomaselli, Tim Thyzel, and William Wegman.
