An invitational exhibition that examines various aspects of the new reality as presented in different media/mediums. The line between reality and unreality has blurred. Reality, in both art and life, is in many cases a manufactured commodity, effect, or action. This exhibit explores the questions of what is real and what is fabricated in contemporary life. Artists include: Betsy Odom, Elona Van Gent, Margaret Meehan, David Krueger, Dennis Harper, Jason Cohen, and David Van Ness. Featuring: Dave Hanson's “Resurrection of Philip K. Dick,” a lifelike android.

Curator’s Statement

UnReal: show titles are sometimes an excuse to throw a theme party rather than an exploratory platform for relevant, informed substance. Perhaps in this case ‘unreal’ can do both. Its colloquial understanding triggers a sense of expressive disbelief in either the believable or the unbelievable. It can have a negative reflection, go beyond the ability to cope, recall the freakish or bizarre. Or it can create a positive response, one too good to be true, something fantastic and incredible. Whatever the case, its use is in relational contrivance to our universal sense of the real. In the art world, it has become a gray area that only takes solid form in its contextual use. Because artworks are real (corporeal) things in and of themselves, their referential connection to the real world can be perceived with a duality of purpose. They can exist in their own form of reality or act as antithetical replicates, mocking reality and usurping meaning as they are experienced. Or they can act as representational agents reporting the ‘unreal’.

For several millenniums, we have grappled with the idea of whether artworks are real or simply illusory representations of the real: real as truth, real as beauty, real as objects in their own right. Nietzsche argued, “Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed along side thereof for its conquest.” Modernism has won the battle that art is its own form of offspring created through the transition of breeding the real with its many hypothetical possibilities. From Cezanne’s experimental planar conjugations to Dada’s root form of declarative providence, artists have pushed to create their own reality, banking off this new found sovereign gusto rooted in formalism and unique truth.

Evidence to the new ‘real’ is when it becomes self referential, as it does with industrial design and the world of architecture spawning from the Bauhaus. The one thing lacking in this new world order is a humanistic connection, which oddly enough comes through the marketing industry and the world of technology.

With pop art, film/video and process/earth art we are ushered into the virtual world where a blending of nature, formalism, time and culture diffuse the boundaries between art imitating life with life now imitating art. With the advent of digital capabilities and the Internet, we now have a user friendly art medium where truth can be fabricated and nature obscured and reconfigured easily at will, forcing a new reality that calls into question what is real and what is fiction. As Mark Twain remarked in his day, “truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense.” In our contemporary world nothing has to make sense to be believable as real or as fiction. The two coexist quite readily, making us more mindful than ever of Wittgenstein’s statement that “in the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did, it would have no value.” In the case of the ‘unreal’, it may not matter how it’s defined, what matters is where we take it and what we make of it. This becomes the power of its existence. It then becomes part of our reality, which according to Einstein “is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
— Greg Metz