Potemkin // Body

About

It is avatar identities, assumed structures of knowing and behavior, illusions of safety/prosperity/space. It is the abstract body in variable forms: political, physical, virtual, and architectural. It is not static, nor whole–rather changeable, material unto itself. 

// 

Surfacing from the notion of the Potemkin Village, this group exhibition seeks to investigate the ways in which media and medium shift our understanding of personal and social structures, and how they can be (de)constructed. 

Working across and between disciplines, the artists included independently interrogate the solidity and definition of accepted frameworks, whether a question of physical environment, personal identity, or societal constraint. They thrive in the fluidity formed between surface strictures and internal substance, actively engaging space as a form of subversion. Seemingly sound while intentionally elusory, these works repeatedly dissolve and reform anew, destabilizing the physical site and body as a source of certainty. 

In turn, the truth of the Potemkin Village was an intended lie. A self-reflexive myth in content and construction, it was deception employed towards political capital. Yet whether material or mirage, the structure was built // alternative, meta, resolved // out of nothing–and so it remains.

Featuring: Ann Greene Kelly, Cécile Krähenbühl, Devin N. Morris, Mario Navarro