NEWAGERIOT & The Joy of Blues    May 14 - Jul 4, 2009

NEWAGERIOT [gallery I]
Country Club is pleased to present NEWAGERIOT, a group exhibition seeking spaces that are both internal and transcendent. The artists included in NEWAGERIOT, Kamrooz Aram (NY), Beth Campbell (NY), Bob Flanagan (LA), Jack Goldstein (LA/NY), Jen Liu (NY), Larry Mantello (NY), Shana Moulton (NY), Manuel Ocampo (Manila), Lisi Raskin (NY), Sleep (NY), revisit the past and project the future to escape/analyze the present and/or intentionally create temporal, spatial, emotional and spiritual dislocation. NEWAGERIOT lies in no fixed space, transporting worlds into interiors and making private spaces manifest.

Kamrooz Aram’s lush paintings evoke video game landscapes, religious iconography and military imagery in equal measure. The environments created by Manuel Ocampo are collisions of religious and secular imagery. Both artists remain elusive in their specific sources and conclusions. They are locations caught between becoming and disappearing, somehow temporal even though the paint remains fixed on the surface. Beth Campbell explores a similarly transitory terrain in her ongoing series of mobiles that simultaneously function as drawings in space and psychogeographic maps, intensely personal and universal.

These works are silhouetted against Jack Goldstein’s (1957-2003) untitled work on canvas that seems to chart some type of phenomenon, a static rendering of a fleeting moment removed from its context. The painting, from 1985/86, is situated in the middle of a time when Goldstein transitioned from experimental/conceptual filmmaking into painting instances of spectacle – lightning fields, astral and volcanic events. The effect of the work is to transport us to the center of an undefined yet momentous phenomenon.

Bob Flanagan (1952-1996), an artist, poet, performer, writer, and musician, suffered from cystic fibrosis for the majority of his life. Cystic fibrosis is a disease that typically kills before adulthood. Flanagan attributed his ability to manage the pain and prolong his life by adhering to his credo “fight pain with pain.” Working with his partner and dominatrix, Sheree Rose, Flanagan explored ritualized pain as a means to absorb the punishment of the disease and to find a space that could bring a measure of peace. NEWAGERIOT will feature a wall comprised of children’s alphabet blocks repeatedly spelling “CF” and “SM,” and others featuring drawings of butt plugs, whips, chains, scalpels, syringes and dominatrix gear, the objects of Flanagan’s trangressions and transcendence. This piece was originally exhibited in his landmark exhibition Visiting Hours in 1993 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Larry Mantello’s recent collages, composed primarily from temporary tattoos, borrow liberally from popular and low culture. A dizzying arrangement of cartoon characters and garish logos and text alongside graphic scabs and wounds play out as bizarre before-and-after images of a culture dealing in childish, escapist fantasy – where the artificial/virtual is valued over the real/concrete. Also trading in escapist tendency, video artist Shana Moulton has developed an exaggerated world of New Age products and self-help remedies. In a poignant series of misadventures, the comically hapless protagonist seeks and finds ecstatic enlightenment and all of the consequences that brings. Jen Liu’s vision of a New Age looks back to medieval devices and constructs to build a world in which the battles between nature and technology, resistance and state power, nostalgia and modernity are illustrated in her video The Brethren of the Stone: Iron Man.

Sleep (Todd Pavlisko & Max Schubert) describe themselves as the confluence of the truest truth and the darkest secret radically brought to life through armchair dream analysis performed by two patently mischievous dreamers addicted to the thrill of the unknown. Their work references recreational drug culture and a slippery hold on suburban surrealism. Lisi Raskin’s makeshift satellite dish facilitates the transmission of a radio-style dramatization of the events of Able Archer 83, a US-Soviet standoff set against the backdrop of escalating nuclear tensions. The sculpture and accompanying audio bring a global conflict into an intensely personal space.

THE JOY OF BLUES [gallery II]
In Gallery II, Country Club is delighted to present The Joy of Blues. The Joy of Blues is a focused collection of works by three artists Barkley Hendricks (CT), Lee Ranaldo (NY), João Paulo Feliciano (Lisbon), exploring sonic histories and the visual manifestations of sound. João Paulo Feliciano’s photo collages document the flickering lights of “The Blues Quartet”, a sound-to-light sculpture responding to programmed music. Feliciano handles his subject as if he were photographing a band in mid-performance – portraits of colored bulbs and orbs bouncing around the edges of the photographs. Lee Ranaldo, founding member and guitarist for experimental rock band Sonic Youth, digs deep into music history and his own contributions therein to examine the ways that such histories are articulated. Barkley L. Hendricks is one of the most compelling image-makers of his generation. His paintings and photographs since the mid-1960s chart new territory in African-American portraiture, a collision of American realism and postmodernism. Hendricks’ contribution to The Joy of Blues is a new photographic print portraying legendary Jazz musician Dexter Gordon.