Friday, September 21, 2012

Celebrity Skin, White Box Contemporary, San Diego. CA, August 1-25, 2012

Celebrity Skin
Curated by Raul Zamudio
White Box Contemporary
San Diego, CA
August 1-25, 2012

The exhibition Celebrity Skin takes its title from a song by the same name authored by the rock band Hole. In metaphorically written in the first person and alluding to the affected, unapologetic and ultimately redemptive life of its singer, its self-reflexivity is loaded with subtext about the vacuity of the music and Hollywood movie industries and their coteries of deal-making agents, paparazzi, cosmetic surgeons, hangers-on, and general star-struck, stargazers.

The exhibition extends the song title’s suffix to mean surface and shallowness; while celebrity is demystified and becomes commonplace in a debased world of Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter where, in the words of Andy Warhol, “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”

The exhibition Celebrity Skin uses these subtexts as foil to elaborate a new kind of iconoclasm that hones in on what philosopher Theodor Adorno called the culture industry. These contemporary forms of idol-breaking articulated in the exhibition’s artworks do not solely rub up against the historical notion of idolatry that early medieval religious fanatics sought to destroy, for the artworks also set their sights on other targets including politics and ideologies, monuments, history, art history, the art world, corporate culture, the family, the social construction of beauty and fashion as well as the culture industry in general. The international exhibition of known and emerging artists articulate diverse subject matter within the exhibition’s curatorial framework via painting, sculpture, works- on-paper, photography, installation, video, and performance.

Artists:
Claudia Baez/US
Marc Bijl/Netherlands
Wim Delvoye/Belgium
Adolfo Doring/US
Martin Durazo/US
Juan Carlos Granados/Mexico
Sangwoo Koh/Korea
Ferran Martin/Spain
Emma McCagg/US
Miss Aniela/UK
Andre Von Morrise/US
Lindsey Noble/US
Jaime Ruiz Otis/Mexico
Damian Ontiveros/Mexico
Riiko Sakkinen/Finland
Kiki Seror/US
Joaquin Segura/Mexico
Manuel Rodriguez Sepulveda/Mexico
Celia Elasmieh Shomal/Iran
Kasper Sonne/Denmark
Matt Tackett/US
Mookie Tenembaum/Argentina
Chris Trueman/US
Palo Klein Uber/UK
Abdul Vas/Spain
Ruben Verdu/Spain
Eric Yahnker/US
Wojtek Ulrich
Allison Van Pelt/US
Emma McCagg with John Ollom Dance MOvement & J. Sable/Photography/US
Natasha Zupan/Spain






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