Bite the Hand

About

I couldn’t begin to tell you how I ended up doing this — I, per usual, worked myself ass-backwards into finding the only thing in the world I want to do. In my mind, the only thing in the world a person like me can do. My marketable skills are limited to arranging UPS pickups and nodding eagerly on Zoom calls, and my (often vocal) resistance to authority makes me a tough hire. I’m also an obsessive, paranoid workaholic, whose cynicism is outweighed only by an outsized sense of ability. An American Psycho in the making, or God’s perfect little gallerist.

The art world I’ve found myself mirrors a lot of these qualities. It is defined by paradoxes that are rendered functional not out of necessity, but often because no one can figure out how (or gives enough of a shit) to change them. Collectively, we haven’t decided whether we want to be publicly popular or quietly respected, rich or poor, savvy or obtuse, global or local, and many of us (myself included) can be guilty of pursuing all of them all at once.

GROVE has put together a show of artists that we feel draws attention to duality and duplicity, which is very closely linked to irony and sarcasm. In essence, the exhibition pivots around the idea of things being different than they appear. Duplicity does this overtly, at times nefariously, while irony and sarcasm use this duality often to comedic ends. Even still, the artists in the exhibition explode these dynamics. Is the work of Maggie Dunlap, thematically “online” and rooted in both hilarious and morbid questions of epistemology, duplicitous when it tells you it’s lying? Or what about the work of Bora Akinciturk or Patrick Quinn, in which irony is so layered as to cross over into meme aesthetics? There is a broad spectrum of both work and practices, but ultimately, this exhibition is a way to poke fun at a broader arts ecosystem that, much of the time, is nothing it pretends to be, and everything it asserts it’s not.

Many of the works are paintings, or else things that could go on the wall, either in a gallery or in a home. Why? Because at the end of the day, this is our careers, our baby that we’ve nursed, our lives; we’d like more than anything to keep doing it, to keep living them, and selling works allows us to do that. Yeah, I’ll rag on the art world, but the truth is, the only place I want to be is in the saddle at this shit-show rodeo.

— Jacob Barnes
GROVE Founding Director