Kick in the Eye

Hi all - I am very sorry to have missed the last session. I wanted to provide a little here about how my progress is coming thinking about the show. I would appreciate any feedback or suggestions you have very much.

Kick in the Eye

Graham Durward (New York)
Nicole Eisenman (New York)
Alexandra Gorczynski (Philadelphia)
Wynne Greenwood (Seattle)
Stephen Irwin (Louisville, KY)
Paul Lee (Brooklyn)
Lovett/Codagnone (New York)
Matthew Savitsky (Philadelphia)
Marc Swanson (Brooklyn)
Scott Treleaven (Paris)
Nicola Tyson (New York)

Kick in the Eye is a group exhibition of recent painting, sculpture, installation, and video that highlights fractured ways of looking and being seen. Through sideways glances, mis-identification, and quiet confrontation, these artists create queer portraits, in a broad sense, that call into question what we might think we know about processes of identification. What might be activated in a viewer through deliberate masking, hiding, coding, covering, or obfuscating? Instead of facilitating a bourgeois consumption of an "other," these works function as broken mirrors that deny easy absorption of difference. The artists use strategies of role play, theatricality, defiance and abstraction to prompt important questions about looking and being seen.

This slippery back-and-forth of identification finds touchstones in gay culture and history: role-playing, cruising, the crisis of the body with AIDS, hidden touches, and conscious obliteration of ego. More importantly, though, these works represent a very current trend of thinking about how to look at queer bodies in an age of hyper-representation and supposed celebration of difference.