| Artists Use Childhood Motifs to Explore Adult Issues |
(The Bronx, October
1, 2001) The exhibition takes place at the Longwood Arts Gallery, the visual arts facility of the Bronx Council on the Arts, located at 965 Longwood Avenue between Beck Street and Kelly Street in the Bronx from November 10, 2001 – January 12, 2002. A public opening and reception takes place from 12:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 10, 2001. Normal gallery hours are Monday through Friday 9 a.m. - 5 p.m., Saturdays 12-4 p.m. and by appointment. The contemporary art world has recently seen a great number of artists who are using childhood motifs to explore adult issues. This phenomenon raises the question, "Why childhood motifs?" The answer may lie in the post-modern phenomena of irony replacing emotion, referentiality replacing originality and the collapse of distinctions between popular and "high" culture. Or the answer may lie in our generation’s exhibiting regressive tendencies, which may have been inspired by the relative ease of adult life at the end of the 20th Century. These regressive tendencies may be due to our generation’s having been raised by the more permissive Vietnam generation in the 1970s coupled with a period of unprecedented prosperity and peace in the mid to late 1990s. At the start of the 21st Century, we are now entering a new period in history marked by the burst bubble of the dot-com economy, a looming economic recession and the terrorist attacks upon The World Trade Center and Pentagon. We may soon find ourselves able to view the use of childhood motifs in contemporary art from a new perspective. Kid’s Stuff features contemporary artists who use childhood motifs to explore adult issues and features work by Laura Carton, Susan Hamburger, Joonhyun Kim, Davora Lindner, Frank Liu and Mary Magsamen. |
| Laura Carton |
| Laura Carton creates her photographs by downloading a variety of pornographic images from the Internet, removing the bodies and then digitally reconstructing the backgrounds from the existing evidence. The images included in Kid’s Stuff would appear to be innocent images of childhood playgrounds and living spaces were the viewers not informed of their source. |
| Susan Hamburger |
| Susan Hamburger presents small works on vellum in ink, watercolor and gouache that resemble the kinds of doodles that early adolescents scribble into the margins of notebooks. The images are of social gatherings but are combined with a running text, which expresses the unspoken insecurities of the figures that are trapped in these social gatherings. |
| Joonhyun Kim |
| Joonhyun Kim presents a large-scale painting of a distraught figure in a style that is informed by Pop and Japanese animé to explore how readily we rely upon sentimentality to express genuine human emotions. |
| Davora Lindner |
| Davora Lindner presents small-scale installations, which feature macabre dolls, which are arranged in scenes that seem to allude to physical abandonment or human sacrifice. |
| Frank Liu |
| Frank Liu presents selections from a series of paintings in which he uses Sesame Street’s Ernie as a surrogate self in his explorations of his identity as a homosexual man and a Chinese American. One painting depicts Ernie lying on a pile of refrigerator-magnet alphabetical characters. Unless informed of the fact, the viewer would have to be highly observant to determine that the letters spell the words, "Fag" and "Chink." Another piece presents Ernie and Bert in a pose that would – if the figures were of anatomically correct humans – depict an act of mutual oral stimulation. |
| Mary Magsamen |
| Mary Magsamen presents a video installation that focuses on the supposedly childish habits of making wishes and compiling wish lists. One element of the installation is a collection of lollipops in the shape of carousel horses. The lollipops have slips of paper tied around their sticks, which have printed upon them such adult wishes as "I wish thongs were comfortable," "I wish there was no such thing as cellulite," and "I wish my ex-boss would be bitten by a rattlesnake." |
| Running concurrently with Kid’s Stuff is a two-person exhibit of abstracted figurative paintings by Yvonne Limón and Angel Vallarta. |