ART FAIR

"MILK AND NIGHT"

A group Show of 13 Artists, 12 female artists + 1 male artist

SPRING/BREAK Art Show curated by Coco Dolle

4 TIMES SQUARE, NYC

FEBRUARY 28th - MARCH 6th, 2017

Artists Exhibited: ANGE, Carol-Anne McFarlane, Cindy Hinant, David Henry Nobody Jr, Ellen Jong, Grace Graupe-Pillard, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Leah DeVun, Leah Schrager, Marie Tomanova, Pola Esther, Rebecca Goyette, Ventiko.

"In this milk and night edition for SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2017, I have carefully selected a handful of artists whom I believe represent different aspects of feminism within the alternative and academic communities. With this presidency, our role as artists is especially pivotal in the breakdown of mainstream media, our dark mirror, which daily confronts us and moves us to self-introspection. We’re forced to re-evaluate and re-negotiate our terms of human decency and morality, presenting ourselves to daily critical thinking from our local communities to a broader international consciousness. In my curatorial, I wanted to revisit the shadow-self of our psyche by exploring an aesthetic of darkness with elements of humor, derision, self-deprecation, restraints, outrage, shock and beauty.

In that respect and within the main theme of the fair, BLACK MIRROR, I have chosen the number of 13 artists as an element of discomfort, the ill-fated number evoking ideas of sin, curse, rebellion and lawlessness. It is a symbolic number rooted in our patriarchal unconscious with The Last Supper. In my re-configuration, the balance of power has changed as 12 female artists share my exhibition room with one male artist. In my mind, this ‘gentle-tokenman’, whose work employs the feminine rhetoric of objectification and commodity, is then cast as our thirteen’s sinner, he is the one who is now polarizing the duality of redemption and sin. This image of The Last Supper also evokes a more contemporary one – that of our President signing anti-abortion executive order surrounded only by his ‘male disciples’. These imbalances of power and uneven geometry, I believe need to be addressed through the alchemy of art. By recasting this ideology and bringing together a different iteration of thirteen, I hope to offer concepts of inclusion, communion and authority where the stifled becomes the new principle. As a feminist curator and artist, I believe my role is to withstand prevailing norms while introducing a changing in paradigm. "

- Curator Coco Dolle

Public Performance curated by Coco Dolle, ‘Self-portrait as a Buffet Table’ by David Henry Nobody Jr. Images: Olimpia Dior