Continuing through November 27, 2010
The artists in this intellectually challenging group exhibition, "Ballad of the Non-Specific Object," have come of age in the new century, and it shows in works that take on fabrication and authenticity through a digital, post-globalization lens that is still very much Western. Allison Wiese embeds blinking red alarm signals in the kind of generic landscape "paintings" sold as "art" in chain furniture stores or thrift shops. Battery boxes are strapped to the frames, wires trailing like bombs. Nate Cassie continues his exploration of the tension between individual and community with new birdhouses - one constructed of Plexiglas, its transparency at odds with our association of privacy with shelter, its predictable form at odds with our desire for individuality.
Sasha Dela's "Mixed Volumes 4 (Searching)" is a wooden shelf lined with worn books - e.g. "Spectacular Rogue," about con man Gaston Means, "Earth's Aura," and "The "Interpretation of Symbolism." Are they deft facsimiles? Artifacts? Hybrids as it turns out, for our hybrid times. In an age when "searching" is reduced to "Googling," Dela turns art's ingrained critique of mass production into an elegy for the personal, tactile experience of mass culture.
David Shelton Gallery
