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Get bitter, and cling to guns or religion or award shows...
Tanyth Berkeley Gina Dawson Jenny Drumgoole Calvin Lee Christine Rogers
Opening Reception: 6-8pm, Saturday, Jan 29, 2011 Exhibition dates: Jan 25 - Feb 13, 2011.
Arts & Sciences Projects presents “Get bitter, and cling to guns or religion or award shows…” a group exhibition curated by Brooklyn-based photographer Carl Gunhouse.
“Get Bitter” continues Gunhouse’s exploration of consumer culture and the failed American dream, themes explored in his recent American Desire exhibition at Arts & Sciences PROJECTS. Featuring a range of works in photography, video, sculpture, and performance from Tanyth Berkeley, Gina Dawson, Jenny Drumgoole, Calvin Lee and Christine Rogers, “Get Bitter” brings together artists that focus on the intersections between popular culture and the current state of America.
Calvin Lee’s eloquent photographs of images and image-makers in Los Angeles invite you to lose yourself in a carefree world of decadent superficiality, a world distant from ever-increasing unemployment, slumping housing prices and political gridlock. The desire to be connected to the rewards that come to the celebrities who inhabit popular culture are lived out in Gina Dawson’s hand-carved wooden trophies, created while watching award shows. Hollywood dreams can start with the purest of desires and quickly descend into a very dark place, as captured in Jenny Drumgoole’s loving and bizarre performance videos. Yet these illusions of luxury bottom out into our current reality as seen in Tanyth Berkeley’s touching portraits of aging prostitutes, photographed just before the point when age intervenes to bring their desperate last-ditch careers to a halt. Christine Rogers rounds out the show with a disarming video in which she lip-synchs a YouTube clip of a small child reciting the Lord’s Prayer. This familiar bedtime ritual is performed for an unknown internet audience in hopes that some greater power will be looking over us in these troubled times.
BIOS
Tanyth Berkeley
Tanyth Berkeley was born in Hollywood, California, and currently lives and works in New York. She received her MFA in photography from Columbia University in 2004 and holds a BA from City College of New York in photography and creative writing. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions including “New Photography” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2007, and at Bellwether and Danziger Projects.
Gina Dawson
Gina Dawson was born in Dallas, TX and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA from the University of North Texas in 2002 and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2005. Her work has been exhibited in multiple group shows in Texas, Boston, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. In 2010 she had a solo exhibition at Galerie Jeanroch Dard in Paris, and in April of the same year she was in a two-person show at Judi Rotenberg Gallery in Boston.
Jenny Drumgoole
Jenny Drumgoole is a Philadelphia-based multimedia artist who incorporates video and performance into extradisciplinary actions inserted into the public domain. Her most recent video-based performance work involves the artist physically and virtually infiltrating competitive events with subversive art actions which question our obsessions with celebrity, desire, and the limits and illusions of individuality in popular culture. Drumgoole received her MFA in photography from Yale University in 2006. Her work has been shown at the IFC Center in New York, The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, The Center for Contemporary Art in Israel, and the Figge von Rosen Gallery in Germany
Calvin Lee
Calvin Lee is a conceptual-based photographer from Boston, MA. He received an MFA in Photography and Media from the California Institute of the Arts in 2009, and a BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA in 2007. His work combines conceptual strategies to explore the connectivity of images, the repression within representation, and the visual semiotics of an image through metonymy and metaphor. Through his analytical, personal, and experimental practice, his work deals with multiple theory based discourses in conversation that question technology, culture, representation, and language. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Christine Rogers
Christine Rogers received a BA in Anthropology in 2004 from Oberlin College and an MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University in 2008, where she studied primarily photography and video. Her work and research has focused on revisiting the faith-based proposals that began in the Modernist period of photography in the late 1950s. Recent projects have included examining the construction of Family though the construction of the family portrait. She currently teaches photography at Wellesley College, and previously has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Art Institute of Boston, and Chester College of New England.