BEAUTY’S BURDEN

BETHANY BRISTOW


Curated by David Gibson and Jennifer Junkermeier

Bethany Bristow, Bonnie Collura, Gabert Farrar, Limor Gasko
Scott Kiernan, Karen Marston, John O’Brien, Sono Osato
Meridith Pingree, Richard Schort, Fumiko Toda

Ernest Rubenstein Gallery of The Educational Alliance
197 East Broadway, New York NY 10002

September 18 – October 31, 2008
Reception: Thursday, Sept 18, 6-8 PM

Beauty's Burden explores our predetermined attitudes toward art as a means of personal and cultural expression. In a museum-style exhibition that is directed only by its theme, we hope to show how beauty operates in collusion with the specific dictates of image and form, occurring randomly across mediums, flowing through the cracks in our understanding of each artist's process. Beauty in this case does not represent an idealized standard, but an element of culturally determined content that collaborates in the moment (or process) of creation with ideas specific to each artist's formal aim. The artists in this exhibition were chosen because their work contained ideas about the vestigial origin of creativity. Each artist's specific achievement was neither dependent upon a realization of form that was pleasing to the eye, nor signified a form of idealism beyond individual concerns: obscure or ambiguous references to architecture, mathematics, biology, computer image sampling, and the obsolescence of the machine age. Yet each has brought us a little closer to finding a way back to beauty, and forward in time to a new place for aesthetic discovery.

BONNIE COLLURA





GABERT FARRAR




LIMOR GASKO





SCOTT KIERNAN




JOHN O'BRIEN





SONO OSATO




MERIDITH PINGREE




RICHARD SCHORT




FUMIKO TODA