Garden of Skin, a group exhibition curated by Zachari Logan, September 4th - 29th, 2018. Opening reception: September 4th 2018, 6-9PM.
GARDEN OF SKIN | ANGUS-HUGHES GALLERY Sept. 4th - Sept 29th, 2018
The garden is a constructed space that exists in almost every culture, a site of mental and physical sustenance. In part, the garden is a location of aesthetic creativity, expressing a human desire to control impulses that are uncanny, emotive responses to an environment we cannot fully understand. Like the landscape outside the gates of the garden our bodies are not separate from this space, simply an aspect of it. It is in this way that each of the artists in GARDEN OF SKIN explore the social, sensual and poetic aspects of the landscapes in which their bodies inhabit and are subject too.
The skin of plants, of animals and of the earth is the first physical location one witnesses the symptoms of misuse and disease. The vulnerability of this surface can be metaphorically understood in each artist’s work, regardless of medium as an aesthetic epidermis, presented to the naked eye of the viewer. It is the exterior that counts in this context; and not superficially. Much of the work in this exhibition revels in the beauty of texture, colour, form and ornamentation, coupled with a depth of narrative and seriousness subverting the interpretation of the ‘decorative’ as non-functional or superfluous.
As cultivators in the context of the white cube, or in this case, the more domestic setting ofAngus-Hughes Gallery, a space emerges for the intersection of ideas that informs a cross pollination of meaning. We as humans experience our environment in several key phenomenological ways: through scent, sight, sound, taste and touch. This exhibition features work from artists in Australia, Canada, India, Italy, Mexico, the UK and the US, each revealing an articulation of these experiential views as vastly different, both physically and politically; ranging in topic from sexuality and gender to race, the effects of colonialism, ideas of embodiment, ecology and aesthetics.
-Zachari Logan, Curator.
The garden is a constructed space that exists in almost every culture, a site of mental and physical sustenance. In part, the garden is a location of aesthetic creativity, expressing a human desire to control impulses that are uncanny, emotive responses to an environment we cannot fully understand. Like the landscape outside the gates of the garden our bodies are not separate from this space, simply an aspect of it. It is in this way that each of the artists in GARDEN OF SKIN explore the social, sensual and poetic aspects of the landscapes in which their bodies inhabit and are subject too.
The skin of plants, of animals and of the earth is the first physical location one witnesses the symptoms of misuse and disease. The vulnerability of this surface can be metaphorically understood in each artist’s work, regardless of medium as an aesthetic epidermis, presented to the naked eye of the viewer. It is the exterior that counts in this context; and not superficially. Much of the work in this exhibition revels in the beauty of texture, colour, form and ornamentation, coupled with a depth of narrative and seriousness subverting the interpretation of the ‘decorative’ as non-functional or superfluous.
As cultivators in the context of the white cube, or in this case, the more domestic setting ofAngus-Hughes Gallery, a space emerges for the intersection of ideas that informs a cross pollination of meaning. We as humans experience our environment in several key phenomenological ways: through scent, sight, sound, taste and touch. This exhibition features work from artists in Australia, Canada, India, Italy, Mexico, the UK and the US, each revealing an articulation of these experiential views as vastly different, both physically and politically; ranging in topic from sexuality and gender to race, the effects of colonialism, ideas of embodiment, ecology and aesthetics.
-Zachari Logan, Curator.