Wouldn't it be Nice
Including Work by: Marin Camille Hood, Michael Cox, Ilana Crispi, Nicki Ishmael, Josh Luke, Joey Enos, Katie Kawaoka, and Nathan Levine
Curated by: Kathryn Frazier, Nicki Ishmael, Elaine Santos, and Jesse Whittle-Utter
July 21st - August 19th, 2006
Wagonette #1, 2005 by Marin Camille Hood
Summer is often revered as a time saturated with indulgent play, sanctioned hedonism, vivid experience and calculated escape. Through our cultural filter it has become a metaphor for our personal cycles of weariness and regeneration. But Summer is also a time of death, disarray, and displacement, bringing powerful endings before joyful beginnings. Too often does the tension between these two paradigms propel us into a state of confusion, nostalgia, idealization and disappointment.
The work in "wouldn't it be nice" examines our idea of Summer through tactile, aural and visual installation, at once creating an evocative atmosphere and deconstructing its meaning. From references to such powerfully ingrained icons as The Beach Boys to the charming banality of city pigeons, our artists explore the relationship between the reality of summer and its representations, conceptualizations and connotations. The pieces beg the questions, how do we reconcile the dual mandates of carpe diem and il dolce far niente? How do we parse out our own relationships to Summer from the ubiquity of packaged ideas?
The title "wouldn't it be nice" suggests that Summer exists more as potential than fulfillment. As we spend hot days languishing in reverie, we are made uncomfortable by the dilemma of choosing which world to occupy: that of fantasy or of reality. These pieces suggest that Summer exists, paradoxically, between childhood memory and a day-dreamed future, between popular notions and personal experience, but never, somehow, now.
- Jesse Whittle-Utter
