It’s gonna take a lotta love
March 7 – May 24, 2015
Franklin Street Works
Stamford, CT
Curated by Liza Statton and Terri C. Smith
It’s gonna take a lotta love is a group exhibition that explores ideas about inclusivity, authenticity, and commonality in an age of anxiety, isolated individualism, and virtually lived experience. The exhibiting artists eschew the detachment and slick seduction of the screen-based technologies that characterize our attention economy. Yet, rather than critiquing the methods of its captivating thrall, they pursue modes of art-making that focus on the aesthetic and conceptual potential of society’s offcuts. Some artists make and re-make objects using unprofitable and seemingly inconsequential materials. Others create subtle interventions using everyday language, sound and music in ways that speak to ideas of collective experience and personhood.
These artists also share a type of tragic-comic vision of contemporary culture. Humor, joy, and melancholy, among others, mix easily in their work. Such emotional credibility creates a slippage between empathy and alienation. Often fragmentary and provisional in appearance, the works are open, direct, and unapologetic in their emotional appeal.
Artists: Jon Campbell (Melbourne, Australia), Andy Coolquitt (Austin/NYC), Jeremy Deller (London), Jessica Mein (NY), A.L. Steiner + Robbinschilds (NY), Whiting Tennis (Seattle), Stephen Vitiello (Richmond, Virginia), and Wayne White (L.A.)
