Artists:
Situated in a 3,000 sq. ft. warehouse space a few minutes walk from the Beacon train station, Cathouse FUNeral, for the summer of 2017, will be positioned on the flip-side of town from Dia.
Cathouse continues its itinerant off-site program with an installation of harvested FUNeral walls, historical objects, and the work of seventeen deeply engaged contemporary artists. Issues addressed in Leaving Home are immigration, border-crossing, notions of home and diremption, a self tearing apart.
No natural light graces this exhibition, it is a dark and dusty space, evoking a forgotten museum’s forgotten storage space with objects both of our cultural moment and of times and places past. A universal survey of crossed boundaries, both terrestrial and celestial, locating ourselves amongst ourselves in time and space; on land and at sea; in substance and in the void.
Hegel tells us: Reason appeals to the self-consciousness of each and every consciousness: ‘I am I, my object and my essence is I’; and no one will deny Reason this truth. But in basing itself on this appeal, Reason sanctions the truth of the other certainty, viz. that there is for me an ‘other’; that an other than ‘I’ is object and essence for me, or, in that I am object and essence to myself, I am only so by drawing back from the ‘other’ altogether, and taking my place as an actuality alongside it.*
Philosophy is cold comfort when you’ve lost your home, or your nation is war-torn, or you’re bottom feeding in a culture that has forgotten you (if it ever knew you were there in the first place) or, simply, if your neighbors hate you. But applied philosophical systems do determine ownership, justify power and even account for the distribution of food, for example. So, we are not wasting our time here by reflecting on contentiousness and conflict with art, our philosophy. The grave may be empty, but our discourse is full:
Michael Ashkin contributes a sprawling, spontaneous town made of common, corrugated cardboard.
Brad Benischek contributes his exported FUNeral mural and a slice of family life.
Davide Cantoni contributes an on-site mural and a painting of the same shifting image of lostness.
Anne Deleporte contributes passport images without any images.
Ana Delgado contributes a dark painting of a house emptied and aflame.
Ellwood C. Dixon contributes the Santa Maria crossing the sea.
David Dixon, Ellwood’s blood, contributes a clan and some twins.
Shadi Harouni sits at a precipice with family and fear.
Baseera Khan huddles her black shrouds throughout the space.
Pete Moran water-tortures the consequences while sending a beacon into the night.
Luisa Rabbia gives us to us in a cloud along with a belly button of cosmic dimension.
Farideh Sakhaeifar offers exploding mosques and launching rockets with nothing but the pack on your back.
Tariku Shiferaw hangs dark plastic and light plastic, side by side.
Tim Simonds contemplates his navel.
Daniel Swanigan Snow colors us all with accusations.
Tribble & Mancenido show us the comforts of home from the darkened outside.
and Nari Ward gives breathing directions.
This, amongst the distinctive Cathouse FUNeral walls harvested from our defunct gallery space in Brooklyn and arranged in Beacon, NY at 18 West Main Street. Additional objects from China, Africa, and the American colonial past will be on display. Catalogue available. For more information visit CathouseFUNeral.com *Free Admission*
* p. 141, Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F Hegel, A. V. Miller translation (Oxford Univ. Press)
