"Cathouse FUNeral Harvested: The Hunt Intensifies" Coustof Waxman Annex 10 Montgomery Street, NY, NY January 8 - February 19, 2017 opening reception: Sunday, January 8, 6-9PM hrs: Friday - Sunday 12-6PM
Press: Art Critical by David Cohen
Including work by Davide Cantoni, Farideh Sakhaeifar, Jeannie Weissglass, Camel Collective, Daniel Swanigan Snow, Suzy Spence and Elizabeth Harney, with harvestings from Brad Benischek’s 'Ghost City' (May 2015) and David Dixon’s Cathouse FUNeral.
Left: 'Cathouse FUNeral Gallery-Object 4', (2017) gypsum board, pigment, plaster, wood, sandbags; David Dixon & Cathouse FUNeral 'Harvesting, The Hunt (No Blood, No Foul)' (2014) mirror, blood, framed photo mounted on sintra
Right: Camel Collective 'The View From Our Present Location' (2017), cane for the vision impaired on 'Cathouse FUNeral Gallery-Object 5', (2017), gypsum board, paint, pigment, plaster, wood, sandbags
Jeannie Weissglass, 'The Pitcher' (2016), 90 sec. digital video animation
Left: 'Cathouse FUNeral Gallery-Object 5', (2017), gypsum board, paint, pigment, plaster, wood, sandbags
Right: Suzy Spence, 'Widows III and IV (2017), flashe on paper on 'Cathouse FUNeral Gallery-Object 6', (2017), stained panel, wood, sandbags
Farideh Sakhaeifar, 'NASA/ ISIS' (2014), digital print mounted on board on David Dixon, 'Wailing Wall' (2014/17), flashe, masonite, metal
Left: Davide Cantoni, 'Child Soldier', Liberia (2008-2009), acrylic on canvas
Right: David Dixon & Cathouse FUNeral, 'Harvesting: The Hunt I and II' (2014), mixed media
Left: Elizabeth Harney, 'Hunters and Soldiers', (2017) graphite on paper
Right: Davide Cantoni, 'Child Soldier, Liberia' (2008-2009) acrylic on canvas
Left: David Dixon & Cathouse FUNeral, 'Harvesting: The Hunt I and II' (2014), mixed media
Center: Brad Benischek, Harvesting from his 'Ghost City' (2015)
Right: Daniel Swanigan Snow, 'I Had a Nightmare' (2013), ink, paper, frame
exhibition photographs by Dario Lasagni
Cathouse FUNeral continues its harvested program in the Lower East Side at Coustof Waxman Annex (other on-site locations have been Cathouse Retrospective at Chemistry Creative in October and Cathouse FUNeral Harvested at 132 10th Avenue in Chelsea, currently open through January 21). At Waxman, walls built from remnants of FUNeral’s former gallery space in East Williamsburg serve as support for an exhibition about violence both latent and manifest in today’s culture.
Upon entering The Hunt Intensifies, one is confronted with a large mirror with “The Hunt” scrawled backwards in blood. A framed photograph of a skull with a bullet hole is affixed to the mirror. The photo’s title, No Blood, No Foul, doubles as the defining problematic addressed by the show: In street ball, “no blood, no foul” means one can play hard without fear of penalty; if no one is physically hurt, there is no foul.
To say, as above, that the affixed photograph of a skull has “a bullet hole” is true, but to say that it has two bullet holes is also true, because one is an actual bullet hole shot with a rifle into this life-sized photograph of a skull, the other is a bullet hole in the skull represented in the photograph. (The photographed skull was illegally removed from a battlefield during the Philippine-American war.)
The difference between the bullet holes in art terms is a rather hackneyed question of real versus artifice. Yet the difference between the two bullet holes in political terms is quite urgent; it is the purveyor of terror’s terrifying question: under what conditions does one move from producing meta-discourse about violence, turning instead to real violence as expression? And does one ascend or descend when crossing this line of “the real”. The fact remains, one can fire bullets at a photograph of a skull forever, making a very strong statement, but physically hurting no one. In The Hunt Intensifies, we emphatically remain engaged artists of culture where there is no blood and there is no foul, but we continue to play hard.
Camel Collective plays blind-man’s-art-bluff with a blind man’s cane, while Farideh Sakhaeifar conflates NASA rocket launches with ISIS exploding mosques. In an animated video, Jeannie Weissglass serves presidential pitchers of blood, while Suzy Spence fox-hunts along with the monied matriarchy in gauche on paper. Innocent children are a leitmotif, with Elizabeth Harney ominously looking after them in graphite, Davide Cantoni lifting them from war painted in pearlescent white and Daniel Swanigan Snow demonstrating, with an unsettling newspaper clipping, the devastating effects of racism on them. Brad Benischek contributes an armed rabbit “harvesting” from his Cathouse FUNeral Ghost City show, and David Dixon provides assisted ready-made harvestings taken from the original The Hunt at Cathouse FUNeral in 2014, which this show revisits with renewed urgency and complexity.
For more information contact David Dixon: 646-729-4682 or CathouseFUNeral@gmail.com, CathouseFUNeral.com
