image: Travis LeRoy Southworth, The Growing Metaphysical Void at the Center of My Bedroom Ceiling, 2010, spit wads from magazine ads, dims vary

CAMEL ART SPACE
May 13 – June 12, 2011
Weekends only: 12 – 6 pm or by appointment
Opening reception: Friday May 13, 6 – 9 p.m.
Location: 722 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11211
Directions: L – train to Graham Avenue
2:nd Friday Art Walk: May 12 & June 10

Works by: Julianne Ahn • Alex Paik • Matt Phillips • Travis LeRoy Southworth • Liz Zanis

Curated by: Lauren VHS

The works in Get on the Block explore social and self-conscious anxieties and motivations
surrounding art production and exhibition. Through sincere humor, humility and coy absurdity, these
artists confront what critic Jan Verwoert has termed “the pressure to perform,” the expectation and
demand that artists and cultural producers present only absolute, correct assertions with the “genius-
like” promise of positive results. In contrast, these works offer open-ended proposals or temporary
conclusions, rendering suspect the desire and criteria for defining success or failure.

Suspicious of their assumed positions as key-holders to a romantic, isolated world of the studio, the
artists in the exhibition both embrace and push against the problematic of this rarified space. Jubilance
and serendipity direct Alex Paik‘s skewed, hyper-saturated geometric cut paper drawings and reliefs,
nuanced by a pointed fixation on rudimentary elements. A similar upheaval of and reverence for
formalism is conveyed in Matt Phillips‘ paintings, as picture-making rules are shattered and refracted,
alluding at once to physics, psychedelia and high modernism.

Autobiographic works consider the conditions for their creation and the artist’s interior life as a similar
workspace, exposing the labor of production as an intrinsic result of their everyday experience. Liz
Zanis‘ miniature facsimiles of commonplace objects such as wrapped floral bouquets, train tickets
and phone books reflect upon and speak to anxieties surrounding personal and public exchange and
perception. Julianne Ahn‘s labor and time intensive works reference the intimate mania of art making
and domestic life, as dirty laundry and the grid appear as equals in a hierarchy of categorical terms,
the physical minutia of one realm is allowed to populate the other. Emulating the work of work, Travis
LeRoy Southworth‘s spit-wad accumulations embody a constant churning of thoughts and desire for
action, ruminating at once on where to begin and what could determine an end.

If the idea of the studio distinguishes a place for art-work, or production with the goal of display, then
viewing one’s labor as play becomes a radical gesture. Subverting the anticipation of the artist as
authority and reconsidering the definitions of emotional, intellectual and physical boundaries in the
context of object-making, these works fuse these spaces to propose a more unified and fluid concept
of production.

For additional information contact Lauren van Haaften-Schick: Lauren@LaurenVHS.com