The 6th International Open includes work by twenty-one artists from several different countries, including Germany, Serbia, Hong Kong, and the United States. Works in this show explore a variety of different themes and issues, including the body– disabled, fragile, or aged, the role of personal and collective memory in constructing ethnic and cultural heritage, and landscape as a metaphor for displacement and migration.
Diane Amato and Lisa Morton’s color photograph Olympia Revisited assembles mass cultural objects, including a Barbie doll, an Aunt Jemima figurine, and a Hello Kitty to offer a contemporary version of Eduoard Manet’s nineteenth century painting Olympia. Morton and Amato gather these playthings and bits of Americana to provide “freedom to express humor, sadness and even horror at what is accepted in popular culture.” Rebecca Rhees also engages with mass culture by creating Van Dyke prints of discarded mannequins in her series Mannequin Misfit No. 2, No. 9, and No. 10. Her elegant and elegiac prints evoke images of classical ruins while also exposing a “contradiction between their disabled condition and their humanistic expressions.” Phuong M. Do’s imaginary landscape Untitled 2, uses the medium of digital transparency as a means to materialize the unstable landscape of the artist’s childhood, what she describes as the “between spaces within which I exist, removed from attachment to place and geography.” Sung-eun Lee’s installation of photography and wire All Those Moments Will Be Lost in Time Like Tears in the Rain also excavates the terrain of memory while calling to mind both the delicacy and hardiness of foliage. Manipulating repetition, form, and shadow, the artist seeks to “recall isolated memories… [which] influence my work and help me to create objects similar to diary entries.”
Exhibiting Artists: Diane Amato/Lisa Morton (NC), Elizabeth Buchanan (IL), Holly Cole (AZ), Judy Cooperman (NY), Sara Dankert (NY), Phuong M. Do (NY), Sarah Ferguson (NY), Pamela Hobbs (IL), Alexa Hoyer (MO), Christine LaFaso (IL), Sung-eun Lee (MI), Maria Lobo (Hong Kong), Joann McEwen (IL), Anne Mondro (MI), Deborah Brown Penrose (CA), Tea Popovic (Serbia and Montenegro), Rebecca Rhees (SC), Paula Ross (Germany), Yvette Kaiser Smith (IL), Jill Sutton (IL) and Jing Zhou (CA).
Juror: Lisa Phillips
Lisa Phillips is the Henry Luce III Director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, an institution devoted to advancing innovative art and artistic practice as a vital social force. As a curator at both the New Museum and at the Whitney Museum, she has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues, including those on the work of Mike McCarthy, Charles Ray, Helio Oititica, Terry Perkins, Pierre et Gilles, and Richard Prince. She was written the books Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1955 and The American Century: Art and Culture, 1955-2000.
(Banner image: artwork by Paula Ross)
