"Open. Wide. Sparagmòs", Summer Group Show, July 21 - August 21, 2015. Featuring Artists:
Yevgeniya Baras, Dru Donovan, Sean Donovan, Merritt Johnson, Kristy Luck, Troy Michie, Jakub Milčák, Hannah Plotke, Megan Plunkett, Donald Varnell, William Villalongo, Brian Wondergem.
Open. Wide. Sparagmòs Opening Thursday, July 21, 2016 Reception 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM Through Sunday, August 21, 2016
Exhibition hours: Sat - Sun 12- 6pm
In its inaugural year, the Hercules Art|Studio Program's seven resident artists are kicking off their series of programming with a group exhibition entitled Open. Wide. Sparagmòs on view in the program’s TriBeCa location from July 21st through August 21st, 2016.
Bringing more or something else to the pre-existing can become an increasingly challenging yet welcome necessity in a world where added complexity signals our position and experience. A prosthetic gesture — arising from the ancient Greek prósthesis, "addition, application, attachment” — may embody not one, but many manners of thinking in the generous scheme of the supplementary. When artists add, contribute, and play part in proliferation, their works’ embedded potential energy can bleed into existing structures. Will we imagine ourselves within these structures or beyond? To invite additions and extensions means to accept more, to embrace and confront, to tackle an individualistic sense of oneness, and to recognize that wholeness can and must come in pieces and disparate parts.
The artists included here make work that proposes not only replacement or substitution, but also bridging, obstruction, or breaking apart to arrive at a reconfiguration — striving, despite oddity, toward the new. The ways in which objects take on literal and conceptual extensions hint at each artist’s idiosyncratic politics and poetics. Some constructions echo the functionality of known everyday objects while others reflect spaces ripe with the lesser known. Assemblage, staging, and masking become tools of subversion. The combinations in their works allow us to question where we see the edges, perhaps even where and how we might see ourselves. Dynamic re-combinations emerge from previous ‘tearing apart’, or sparagmòs.
WILL YE RIP IN HALF / Lindsay Allison Ruoff
to be
a sister
is to multiply
we have to open our mouths wide to say
sparagmòs
