LOST HORIZON at HERTER GALLERY, UMASS AMHERST

(Dean Monogenis)
Courtesy of Stux Gallery

FEBRUARY 4-MARCH 4, 2008

Erik Benson, John Berens, Romain Erkiletlian, Michelle Hailey
Laura Harrison, Elizabeth Huey, Rebecca Kolsrud, Jeff Konigsberg
Michelle Mackey, Dana Melamed, Dean Monogenis , Asya Reznikov
Kristen Schiele, Kimberly Sexton, Mary Ann Strandell

“Lost Horizon” represents a critique of themes related to the professional practice and socialized ideal of architecture, its enveloping culture of construction, and the ironic ideals that emerge from assumptions of progress. I perceive these concepts through various artworks, mostly two dimensional and related to the practice of painting, which is mainly illusory in nature, and achieves a visual mythology of the constructed landscape in which the organizing principle of the natural world, its separation of time and place, is denied the chance to manifest in a proper manner. The discursive levels of such imagery aid us in approaching the larger themes at hand.

All of the artists in this exhibition are inhabitants of New York, so that any context related to architecture is also related to urbanism or to the iconic status of buildings as well as to the transient nature of city living. Not all the scenes depicted here are urban ones, and some seem not even to be real in any naturalistic manner. Yet the city does serve a role as a laboratory of such themes: perceiving what it means to live in a landscape that is in a state of constant flux, first in terms of outward appearance or beauty, second in the power systems supported by these appearances, and third by the sense of space that is transmuted by the interaction of so many disparate forms of expression. It’s no surprise that its manifestations in different art-works alternates radically between the real, the surreal, and the abstract.

The approach to an identifiable reality represented by the title of this exhibition is intentionally misleading. A play on words, the Lost in Lost Horizon is meant to imply an obscuring of truth rather than its being misplaced or misrepresented. There’s an old expression that “truth is in the details” but I be-lieve that the details can lie and that truth in often hidden amongst them. The same is true of a city, it is such a large place or context that it hides many truths while seeming to signify one large truth about progress and what it means to us.