Marc Jancou Contemporary is pleased to present "I Know This But You Feel Different," curated by Shara Hughes and Meredith James. Opening on March 9th, this exhibition will feature works by Theodora Allen, Lucas Blalock, Mathew Cerletty, Michael Cline, John Finneran, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Jesse Greenberg, Clare Grill, Nate Heiges, Shara Hughes, Miles Huston, Becky James, Pat McElnea, Boru O'Brien O'Connell, Jacob Robichaux, and Jacques Vidal. An opening reception will be held March 8th from 6 to 8 pm.
As an overarching theme for the show, Hughes and James play with the idea of the gallery as a commonplace or domestic space in which the contents suggest “interior.” Each work carries a recognizable element, a familiarity of form or shape, or a homely or unassuming scale. The recognition these works elicit, and the sympathetic viewpoint it supports, offer the viewer a promise of access to something as intangible as the creative process. As a glimpse through the window gives clues to a home’s inhabitant, these works deal with the call and answer: “Who lives there?” “I do.”
For "I Know This But You Feel Different," artists Hughes and James invited sixteen contributors to provide work based on their conversations about the show. Many of them created new work specifically for “I Know This…” and the show evolved as their discussions progressed. The initial familiarity with which the viewer now apprehends these works gives way to an uncanny hum. Where have we seen them before? This déjà vu, which the artist and viewer alike respond to, acts as a sort of entry into the process that created it.
Much of Mathew Cerletty’s work contains resonances of Pop, but he works to cross-purposes with Pop’s rote banality to create intimately personal scenes. For this show, the painter has made two works on paper whose surfaces subtly describe both their own production and formative experiences of their maker. Claire Gill's painted tapestries reference the texture and transparency of cloth as well as its fluidity and seeming movement in space. Theodora Allen’s large-scale painting contains all the promise of the stage curtain on opening night, as well as the offhandedness of fading drapes. Slightly agape, they invite the curious to view behind their folds, while a gashed drape invokes our repulsion/fascination with the exposed body. Reminiscent of Matisse’s The Piano Lesson, Shara Hughes’ My Head’s Really Not In This similarly works to order and dissemble the internal space compositionally framed by the walls of the depicted room. But where Matisse scraped away representational clues, Hughes has filled her room with squiggles that echo the forms they trace. Pat McElnea and Jesse Greenberg mine the dystopian remains of a long lost information economy, in which bodily and once-but-no-longer-bodily refuse have become hopelessly entangled. Beneath the scrum of life, Michael Cline’s paintings offer an x-ray, an image of two things at once: physicality and memory. Conversely, Lucas Blalock works to destabilize this very physicality. Pro-filmic and image-editing processes are employed so ham-fistedly as to obscure the very object the photograph depicts. And both Becky James and Boru O’Brien O’Connell present videos foregrounding the impossible process of consciously chronicling a narrative, as one is never able to read a book while remaining conscious that one is, in fact, reading.
“I Know This But You Feel Different” will be on view from March 9th to April 14th at Marc Jancou Contemporary. An opening reception will be held from 6-8 PM on Thursday, March 8th.