December 4^th – January 1^st, 2009/10

12.04.09 -

01.01.10

ARTISTS
Per Bilgren | Gideon Bok | Lizzie Bonaventura
Geoff Chadsey | Dawn Clements | Paula Cronan
Nicole Eisenman | Magalie Guerin | Karen Heagle
David Humphrey | Vera lliitova | Leigh Ledare
Liz Markus | Maritza Ranero | Nora Salzman
Sandra Scolnik | James Stanley | Chris Ulivo
Anthony Vitti | Hanneline Rogeberg | Joe Wardwell | Alexi Worth

SCA Contemporary Art debuts its third guest artist as curator directed exhibition. This ambitious exhibition presents the work of 21 artists from across the US. Portraiture for the Silicon Enlightenment: (Fuckheads), curated by Angela Dufresne. A Brooklyn painter with recent projects at the Los Angeles Hammer Museum

Whatever empirical tendencies linking “the portrait” to the hegemony of sentimentality, likeness or the narrations of social castes, that wasn’t devalued by modernism or post-mod-fem-pop-whatever of the 20th century, has been thoroughly decimated by the anarchy of silicon intelligence in the 21st century. Artists now ride this celebration, or plague if you will, this unabridged democracy of images, this deluge of individuals put forth by the vehicle of the media. It is no longer the artist’s responsibility to describe likeness, physical or metaphorical, but to re-present the agencies of identity, and link them to their greater, call it “global”, historical context, whilst also paying homage, affectionately or not, to the individuals represented. Rather than leave portraiture powerless, global media’s unabridged infinities, like say… facebook, with its billions of personal minutiae, allows artists more immediate access points to humanity, increased contact with the surfaces of every day life, virtual yes, but applicable none the less to our common experience. Powered by a deluge of information, artists can further expose the mechanisms of outward appearance and social identity resulting not in static, crystallized renderings, but moving, amorphous things orbiting between the two points; fact or “real” and social identity or “virtual”, forming new, hybrid entities. In the end, such works render the two polarities mute because the works don't pause at either, they only recon themselves with the combined actions of the two as hybrid entities. Each of the artists in this show has gained liberties and permissions from mediated experiences to expand and confound their works possibilities, and the notion of portraiture. Whether personal or appropriated subjects, made from observations or memory, each artist have gained perspectives that could only be bred from free media. Yet all have stood behind the representation the human figure to do so, working at one point or another within the old fashioned notions of observation, ironically to discover something altogether invisible.

Increased contact with the surfaces of every day life, hence our title, Fuckheads.