WORLD WON’T LISTEN

Bruce Conner, Kara Walker, Cheyney Thompson and Andrea Longacre-White.

It is not that the system is broken and requires repair. We are past imagining that our educated brains can fix the structures that defy what sense of right and wrong we have learned. We do not know what should be done. We don’t know where this damaged vessel can turn for restoration. The anchor has long since dropped, and the sediment is deep.

We are artists. Our job is to make exhibitions. We understand that it might seem hypocritical to do our work, to think through questions that hurt our souls, to participate in the market, to sell our work. We get it. We feel the weight of this compromise. We ask the world to look even when we can’t imagine how it might make a difference. And so we find ourselves coming back to the work that calls us, as artists: we make things. We cannot help ourselves but to talk to you, with you, at you.

Bruce Conner, Kara Walker, Cheyney Thompson and Andrea Longacre-White occupy their own corner in our minds. Despite coming from distinct generations, their individual bodies of work are bound by a refusal to be contained by medium or implicit style.

Everything looks like art and art looks like everything. Conner, Walker, Thompson and Longacre-White walk this line, selecting and assembling images/objects that are at once executed, and not, like an artwork. Camouflaged by their tight aesthetic sensibilities, these artists employ the language and history of painting and sculpture to communicate the status of critical issues in the world- at-large, and to investigate the technology, production, and distribution of art-making itself.

The initial look could be romantic — but when you get to the heart of this work, it’s something entirely different — something cold, conceptual, hallucinogenic, and heartbreaking.