Curated by faculty member Greg Metz, this exhibition is an artists’ commentary on a world, which, as a result of anomaly, misinterpretation, appropriation, manipulation, exploitation or neglectful intervention, has had its state altered from the norm. This group exhibition is comprised of works by artists using a variety of processes. From dystopian global conundrums, to bio-engineering fright shows, to bad-hair days, this show lends a creative perspective to disasters tempered by humor and speculation.

From the curator, Greg Metz

Several years ago while visiting the Louvre I was struck by a work of Girodet’s titled Deluge.  It was one of the most powerful works I had seen up to that time, and possibly since.  After researching the work, I learned that it had been incorrectly announced in the Salon Livret, Journal de Paris with the title Scene from the Deluge. Girodet protested that the scene was not that of the Noahidic Deluge of Greek Deucalion, but instead he used the word deluge in the sense of a sudden, partial flood produced by ‘a convulsion of Nature, the type of which, for example, the recent disaster in Switzerland could have provided a picture.’ I began to question what it is that qualifies as a disaster of nature vs. a disaster of the unnatural, the unnatural being that which occurs in the name of God, the supernatural or even of one’s or another’s own doing.  As one allusively battles to define the word “beauty,” so is one challenged to identify what is “natural” as our defining sense of such is skewed from its ontological identity by the evolving transitional dependency of a “man made” environment divested from the forces that govern the seasons.

The Deluge of products, of objects, and of accessibility of information has had enormous effect on our identity and placement of worth, and our ability to prioritize on all fronts. This is an underlying theme in the work of Andy Amato — finding dissonant order amidst the encumbrance of our surrounding things. Here he violates the origin of purpose by stripping it of its apparent employment and re-appropriates it, not to another use, but instead binding it in a place disconnected from our actions, purely transcendent of need or demand, so that it may provide rest in its capture and uselessness. The new status, ambivalent to its former meaning, is now the fulcrum for contemplation, imagination, poetic primacy and the object of a less obvious truth—a seeker for its owner. Amato’s work has a tortured ambience about it, like a victim of Hurricane Katrina that has floated up and received a new coat of paint, reposed as a totem, never to recover its former self.

Disillusioned with the reality of faith-based consumerist and commodity worshipers, seeming to harness the world to a yoke destined for aesthetic bankruptcy, Brandon Kennedy's work shoves at the bell curve with the deviation factor most in line with the Situationists. His attempts to bring a kind of poetic cleavage of word and image back into the humanistic realm from the void of the former, result in a curious irony reminiscent of the French Lettrists. In this case, the functioning symbol of the ATM becomes like Willie Lowman in Death of a Salesman: having raised children and supported affairs, it finally, like the checkbook, is doomed to be mugged by the next wave of technology. There is a sympathetic surreal association to a tool that once stole the face off the bank. And now, like the spy out in the cold, it is being relegated to the compost heap of progress and technolore.

When does the natural become unnatural? Looking back, war seems to be a natural necessity—like prostitution. There is scarcely a time that the world has been without it. It is only when it defies logic or goes against moral authority that it is questioned. At such time, usually when one is losing, it takes on the taint of the “unNatural” disaster, something that with the right information, moral high ground and sound logic should have been avoided. Propaganda and rhetoric diffuse that fact and it goes on, allowing no face for the victims and a death tally that is little more than an abstract integer to most people; yet Rita Barnard, appropriating a child’s war toy figurine (perverse in itself) with a tagline as if from a Chinese fortune cookie, fashions a Sol Lewitt motif into a conscience-shaking memorial installation that makes it all too real. This is not Goya’s disasters of war, nor the monolithic abstract minimal Maya Lin wall, but its own numbing reality check threatening that if one were to hit the zoom key it would go from play to pray.

When encountering an Elaine Bradford creation, one is faced with a convulsion of sensorial and material dichotomy. The gene pool of Grandma’s afghan fusing into a medieval jousting stag could be the failed experiment of the bio-engineered crafting of nature into self-serving creation. This rendering conjures up its own “Handmaid’s Tale” of the dystopic world of forced subjugation of women and nature into a totalitarian theocracy of science where neither may commune as nature intended. These works prove to be as alluring as they are disturbing, yet as a society we are becoming ever more demanding of the power of technology and science to provide opportunistic satisfaction for otherwise very “unNatural” bedfellows.  

We see the “natural” in video and photography become the “unnatural” when those mediums reinvent history, defy the laws of thermodynamics through the special effects of filters and coding, misappropriation, re-contextualizing, and all the micro-brews that technology and art have pioneered in the media development tract championed by Mcluhan’s “the medium is the message” proposition. However, technology and its partner- communication servers - have become so user-friendly that their exploitation by public users brings the unnatural back into the fold as the “new natural.” One must perform on YouTube, have fabricated identities on MySpace and more friends and viewers than your best friend “Tom.” News instantaneously disappears as fast as it appears. An almost Marxist effect rules the medium, as everyone is now an artist working for the common good of the justified self. What, in turn, threatens disaster is the toll that all this has taken on our sense of aesthetics and the thinning of stylistic mastery.

Combating this assault by medium proxy are several artists who have taken on the challenge to subvert the system by using the system. Tim Fetterley and Rich Bott are pioneers in video jamming, starting back in the eighties. They have participated in the evolution of the medium from Nam June Paik to the YouTube phenomenon and are creating works that mimic the cultural trends in a mesmerizingly subversive way.   They are media collage artists, performing scratch video from found, pirated and cutting room floors, whose only predictable moves are their unpredictability and perfect sense of rhythm. They perform as “Animal Charm” whose mystical culture mash suggests that we are becoming victims of our own mass image consumption and maybe loving it to death.

Victor Offen and Betty Washington have developed persona identities generated in opportunistic fashion afforded by MySpace and Facebook templates, which work to confabulate personas. One no longer has to be who they are — in fact it is an accepted reality that most people are not who they are. It only becomes a disaster when one must meet one’s self in reality. Both Offen and Washington combat the acquiescence to mediocrity of aesthetics by embracing it as well. Offen does so with the chagrin of the disinterested voyeur who challenges our sensibilities with the curiosity of framing, incongruous settings infected with a witty downtime syndrome that crawls into your head like a good bad trip.  Washington uses her adopted couth to illustrate “that although we have covered a lot of land with concrete and have fun technical devices, nature is still unimpressed.”  She suggests that “with our dulled natural instincts it appears that our only chance of survival and ultimate world dominance is to eliminate nature altogether, as it will never behave predictably in a manner required for the safety of mankind.”

Yasser Aggour reinstates our faith in paradise amidst the doom and gloom of global challenges… or does he? The delectable manna runs from these digital prints saturated with a heavenly odor that would make the Romantics salivate. Yet, on closer inspection, it is apparent that Aggour’s characteristic ironic wit, along with his surgical slight of hand, has tweaked such utopian promise into dystopic friezes by remixing images from religious sites, terrorist videos and hunting websites. As with his Misconformist series, we are reminded that in the world of image jacking, propaganda cults, mockumentaries and pseudo news outlets, just how easily the worm can turn.

Politics were once confined to bubble diplomacy prior to globalization. The fact that many governments still perform under old rules of order is becoming irresponsible as boundaries collapse and cultures must absorb their differences. Culture clashes are usually the result of reinforcing the stereotypes of various regional or nationalistic identities. Nick Oberthaller and Julien Diehn, young artists from Austria, compare these wool-dyed perpetualities by colliding the sausage-eating, vodka-drinking Polish, branded by the West, to the swaggering Texas-cowboy diplomacy characterized by the Eastern Europeans. They perform this tongue-in-cheek, and in the style of the European 90’s, post-conceptual/minimal agitprop cartoon installation - where the disaster is that it might all be true.

The artists in this exhibition, when taken alone, might not typically be considered “disaster” prompted artists. But what they share is a workbase that lends itself to a re-examination of our increasing reliance on a kind of deluge of technology, religiosity, consumerism and personal/nationalistic identity constructs. These ever-rising tides of human manipulation and desire so influence the way we understand and interact with nature that they often hide or marginalize our original relationship with nature and the role that nature — unstirred — could and should have in influencing our life styles, our belief structures and our aesthetics.