NEW YORK, NY.- Freight+Volume is presenting Pungent Dystopia, a group exhibition of works by David Baskin, Bradley Biancardi, Tony Bluestone, Sam Bornstein, Becky Brown, Nicholas Cueva, Nicholas Dileo, Bel Fullana, Peter Gallo, Alex Gingrow, Rebecca Goyette, Nora Griffin, Anthony Haden-Guest, Karen Finley, Marcel Hüppauff, Dylan Hurwitz, Samuel Jablon, JJ Manford, Emilia Olsen, Michael Scoggins, Dan Schein, Alex Sewell, Emilie Stark-Menneg, Chris Toepfer and Eric Wiley. The exhibition will run from March 19th through April 19th, 2020. The exhibition is on view by appointment only.
Confronting the anxiety, dysfunction, and hysteria of modern society, the works on display embody aspects of escapism and fantasy across alternatingly text-based, figurative, and narrative pieces. Paralleling our “post-truth” political climate, marked by deception, misinformation, and media manipulation, the artists included in the exhibition dive headfirst into their respective aesthetic constructs, deconstructing the precarious state of contemporary society with its own mechanisms. Like an oddly-familiar Bosch landscape, populated by refractions of quotidian life yet innately otherworldly, Pungent Dystopia is rife with imagined IDs and surrogate egos, such as Fullana’s naive, child-like figures and Stark-Menneg’s ethereal avatars, among others. On the other hand, Jablon and DiLeo’s purposely jumbled, disorienting compositions, grounded in text and abstraction, respectively, provide visual analogies of hyper-stimulation and a world in which even journalistic facts are called into doubt.
With their pastel hues and crude forms, Fullana’s canvases radiate a saccharine, childlike sensibility that is offset by her often garish and explicitly sexual subject matter. In All Inclusive and Fountain, she presents sex as a sort of commodity, detached from emotion, recalling the hyper-sexualization of teens and society as a whole. Paradise Birds presents a surreal scene wherein a disembodied, distorted female head hovers above a jungle; surrounded by glowing white birds, the subject appears simultaneously distressed and transcendent, reflecting Fullana’s ability to draw seemingly mundane imagery into larger dialogues. Juxtaposing sentimental scenes of children playing baseball with apocalyptic backgrounds suggesting nuclear devastation, Hüppauff’s paintings similarly blur the lines between nostalgia and anxiety, obliterating innocence with the extreme outcomes of war, and force the question of whether children coming of age in contemporary society still have the possibility of experiencing a true childhood.
Weaving abstraction and figurative forms within his geometrically divided panels, DiLeo’s work expresses the vacuous gulf between fact and fiction that has come to define our current political climate. However, he molds this malleability of truth into a creative tool, constructing riddle-like networks of strange, psychedelic forms.
In Trouble and Delicious Life (II), Jablon skews the spacing and orientation of individual letters, opening his snatches of text to vastly divergent interpretations. Emphasizing the physical forms of each letter to the point that they take on their own meaning, Jablon’s similarly appears to ruminate on the dissolution of unequivocal meaning and truth in contemporary life.
Inspired by VR, 3D animation and video game graphics, Wiley’s canvases fixate on a red-haired, avatar-like character. Recalling the notion of the “uncanny valley”, a theory that as robots become more realistic, they reach a point where their human likeness becomes unsettling, his paintings meditate on the increasingly common presence of virtual reality and our haphazard ways of coping with it.
Amidst the manic, theoretical conjurings and dreamscapes of Pungent Dystopia, Sam Bornstein's Pink Flag stands as a flare of clarity, marking both the exhibition's grounding in day-to-day life as well as reaffirming our individual sovereignty and ability to work as agents for change. Appropriating traditional revolutionary imagery, muted with pink and lavender tones, Pink Flag presents a vision of progress linked to the fundamentally transformative power of the individual.
Pungent Dystopia chronicles dysfunction, panic and injustice in the world, particularly during the current Coronavirus pandemic but ultimately, as in paintings like Pink Flag, has more than just an apocalyptic message - optimism, love, and hope are manifested and conveyed by the artists, for the planet, and for mankind.
