CYDONIA is pleased to announce Homecoming, a curated exhibition featuring Michael Dumontier, Micah Lexier, Trish Tillman, and Emi Winter. The exhibition opens on Saturday, September 9, 2017, and runs until Saturday, October 28, 2017. A reception will take place during Fort Worth Fall Gallery Night, on Saturday, September 9, starting at noon until 9 in the evening at 2955 Crockett Street, Fort Worth, 76107.
Homecoming centers on art negotiating the domestic. Homecoming signifies return, and return is about the familiar. Familiarity produces a cognitive and emotional response, and the artists in this show articulate human thought through an overlapping feeling.
Exhibiting in Texas for the first time, Canadian art icon Micah Lexier will present a video projection and both two and three-dimensional works. In This One, That One, viewers witness a pair of hands arrange and re-arrange everyday materials; cardboard shapes, simple drawings, paper cut-outs of various colors represent the artist’s noesis, simple movement of the individual pieces physically animating his method and thought process. His practice demonstrates plasticity of thought and manifestation where material, process, and form converge.
Objects selected for Homecoming do not require an intermediary of the art system. These artists adopt familiar aesthetics to faciliate an alternate encounter between the object and viewer. In The Logic of Equal Aesthetic Rights, Boris Groys develops an argument concerning art’s autonomy. ‘Art,’ as we define it, came “as result of a long battle of recognition that took place over the course of modernity.” He explains that art, like politics, is connected in one fundamental aspect: they are “realms in which a struggle for recognition is being waged.” Emi Winter’s Zapotec rugs subvert and circumvent the ‘classical avant-garde’ need to be legitimized as an object of artistic desire. The rugs can be installed on the floor or as a tapestry on the wall. Raised in Oaxaca, Mexico by American parents, Winter’s works marry indigenous, pre-Columbian aesthetics with polemics of contemporary painting. Each rug is post-colonial and bi-lingual, woven with iconic designs that date back 2500 years alongside segments of non- representational painting that entered contemporary lexicon 70 years ago. Is Winter’s art more aptly designated as ‘craft’? What happens when a functional object adopts the highly-recognizable vernacular of abstract painting? Why must we treat ‘art’ as ‘art’? Ordinary materials found in daily life develop paths of critical inquiry.
Michael Dumontier’s Untitled (rocks and paper) (face) injects light-hearted levity into the show. The Winnipeg-based artist transports viewers back to our childhood, re-igniting limitless youthful imagination. In this instance, Homecoming is a return to another period of life. More is less. Dumontier arranged the bare minimum of rocks to make a guileless, primitive face. Other compositions in the show also exhibit his immediately identifiable style: powerful restraint framed with soft optimism.
The bizarre and unique can be, paradoxically, common, defying their original notions. Summoning the specific yet proverbial, New Yorker Trish Tillman’s wall-mounted modular works are carefully-composed from a combination of hand-crafted and custom-fabricated pieces along with discoveries, materials, and ornaments found in fetish shops and secondhand stores. Where is the border between artist and artisan? Displaced tassels, segments of necklace chain, metal studs, and phallic shapes find alternative meaning without suppressing erotic desire. A healthy measure of peculiar defiance is interspersed within each work. Tillman’s work recontextualizes African fertility statues in a new world. A modern anthropologist, Tillman imitates Native American totems, emblems, and colors to draw the viewer in, to inspect spiritual tropes, rituals, and human desires.
Homecoming creates encounters within the dichotomy of what people think is ‘art’ and what ‘art’ is. Perception reflects a different intention; the precious rests within the mundane; the kinky and the conventional become bedfellows. Art still has apprehension about the home even if commercial galleries aim to place works into collectors’ home. Objects in Homecoming return elements of the domestic into the white cube for critical and possibly moral reasons.
Thom Wolf’s novel You can’t go home, again tells the story of an artist’s search for his own place in the world. The main character struggles to reconcile his responsibilities. An artist observes the human condition, but isn’t he also responsible for eradicating injustice? True to form, Wolfe only describes how one artist tries to find his answer. The curatorial concept was inspired by the question: ‘Can we go home, again?’
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