The Public Secret curated by David Gibson at The Dino Eli Gallery

By artefuse On 06/12/2012 · 1 Comment · In New York

The Crazy Ghost Fish by Marcy Brafman

Diana still by Carrie Elston Tunick

"Lady in Ruins" 2011-12 Corona Beer Box, cardboard tubes, aluminum loaf pan, string, tape, found images of Greece and Greek Temples, spotlight, tacks, clothespin dimensions variable

These days there are no more secrets. Everyone announces everything that’s on their mind, whether on a Facebook status, a Tweet, or an IM. The very texture of our lives has become the basis for both communication and entertainment, and art is left waiting its turn in line. Any form of organized artifice is immediately suspect, like TV shows, media coverage of political and social events, and even the humble novel.

Yet even as we seek to expose ourselves, we do so in a fashion that is revelatory of can never be public, and it takes an artifice born in secret to express this.

The artist traffics in versions of truth, such as an image that is presented or an object dramatizing an action, or a gesture that creates a design or image that in turn suggests another image or design. The gesture or object are both culturally important, but their symbolic repercussions are idiosyncratically poignant in different ways to different people.

So the secret becomes more than a mystery, it becomes a clue to its own answer. What are the questions here, and how do we address them?

To contact the curator, email articleprojects@gmail.com or call 347-265-9858

ARTIST STATEMENTS

Marcy Brafman

These are paintings born of Jackson Pollock, the end of nature, comic strips, cartoons, rock n roll, John Singer Sargent and a long toxic immersion in the living billboard of electronic and digital life. They are also mixmastered with Marshall McLuhan,Velazquez, Karl Marx, Thorsten Veblen, daytime television, motion poetry on the streets and roads, the great American highway of picture image word. Character as the market value of spirit, object and invention template, font, brand, century, letter, law and personification.

http://www.marcybrafman.com/

Carrie Elston Tunick

My work explores the discord between the way one feels and the way one behaves. When emotion becomes divorced from its context it produces a reaction that is nonsensical and seemingly erratic. In my work I fracture pieces of the body to dislocate the gesture and disrupt its meaning. This disruption opens up new paths of communication, where emotion and action are no longer in concert, and therefore are free to recombine in a myriad of ways. My goal is not to find a singular meaning, but rather to develop a space where emotions and gestures can reform, mix, and mutate. There is no climax or declaration, but a prolonged state of yearning, and inferring.

There is an abject quality to my work, where disfigurement is struggling to be beautiful, or in search of redemption despite its sorry state of affairs. My videos are a kind of portraiture, where individuals are isolated in moments of extreme emotional hysteria, surrounding a celebrity or an event. The images are slowed down and stripped of their context, so that horror and adulation collapse into one another, creating a space where opposing emotions look and feel the same. I chose subjects that are dated so that the film quality is soft and grainy, and at times the imagery dissolves completely. My work imbues sourced imagery with a weight that is neither positive nor negative but fraught with the intensity of unmasked emotion.

http://www.carrieelston.com/

Lindsay Packer

Using popular printed imagery, found objects, light, toys and text, I investigate the line between what we know and what we suspect about the things we see. Inspired by a year of study and travel in India, my most recent body of work focuses on translation, communication and first encounters. Informed by fairy tales, science textbooks and language primers, my paintings, collages and light-based installations examine entry-level curiosity. Children, animals, and other ‘beginners’ attempt to understand the world, each other, difference. In my work, complex structures, simple mechanics and elementary linguistic, scientific and visual vocabularies help question the relationship between object and shadow, cause and effect, original and translation.
http://lindsaypacker.com/

"Lady in Ruins" 2011-12 Corona Beer Box, cardboard tubes, aluminum loaf pan, string, tape, found images of Greece and Greek Temples, spotlight, tacks, clothespin dimensions variable