"We The Watchers Are Also Bodies", April 12 - May 11, 2017. Include works by Hercules Artist Sophie Grant, and guest artists: Maryam Hoseini, Eric Mack, RJ Messineo, Sophy Naess, Jennifer Packer, Rit Premnath, and Em Rooney. Curated by Natasha Marie Llorens.
We the Watchers are Also Bodies is a painting exhibition presenting the work of eight New York-based contemporary artists. The project is organized around four assumptions regarding the relationship between painting and the body:
First assumption: the process of paying attention—to form, to people who would otherwise suffer from invisibility, to the images that tell us what is true and how to live—is one of the most important political tasks we can engage in on a day to day basis.
Second assumption: the point of painting is really to make us aware of our capacity for attention. It doesn’t ask us to pay attention to anything in particular; it is addressed to the phenomenon of attention itself. To the very structure of our watching.
Third assumption: there is contemporary painting that insists on the fact that attention implies a body and there is contemporary painting that is still invested in an abstract, disembodied form of vision.
Fourth assumption: politics that disavow the body are vicious.
The artists in "We the Watchers are Also Bodies" conceive of painting as that which pictures the structure of watching, but their paintings remain objects that remind the viewer that watching takes place with the body.
"We the Watchers are Also Bodies" is the third iteration of NM Llorens’ on-going curatorial research on the critical value of contemporary painting. The first was a performative lecture with Marley Freeman as part of a curatorial residency at Triangle Arts Association in Dumbo. The second was a curatorial practicum seminar at Eugene Lang and an exhibition curated with the students entitled Syntagma.
Natasha Marie Llorens is an independent curator and writer based between New York and Marseille, France. She is a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Columbia University. Her academic research is focused on violence and representation in Algerian national cinema from the 1960s and 1970s.
For more: http://wethewatchers.net/
