Cognitive Dissidence
Thursday, May 11 through Saturday, May 27th, 2017. Open hours Wed-Sun, 12-7pm.
Curated by Dan Cameron
With work by Alanoud Ahmed, Marcela Casals, Brittany Cassell, Avner Chaim, Sivan Dayan, Scott Ferguson, Ivoire Foreman, Zoë Frederick, Jon Gomez, Isabel Gutierrez, Michelle Holman, Alexandra Jabre, Andrew Jilka, Hye Soo Kim, Kyungtae Kim, Camille Lee, HyunSoo Lee, Cela Luz, Georgette Maniatis, Melanie Reese, Malika Sen, Sadie Starnes, Aya Rodriguez-Izumi, Jeff Tan Chang Shen, Prang Vejjajiva, Caroline Villard, Alexandra Wisniewski, and Mengtai Zhang.
The complexity of our present day has resulted in an outbreak of collective stress that is attributed to cognitive dissonance — the sheer effort required to maintain two opposed perspectives in one’s mind simultaneously, or to maintain a fixed set of beliefs in the face of contradictory facts. In less than a year, the world has been introduced to both the concept of ‘fake news’ — i.e., erroneous or misleading stories generated to mislead and confuse anyone who is exposed to them —, and to the parallel phenomenon of the makers of fake news claiming that any effort to expose them represents the ‘real’ fake news. The artists in this exhibition offer a species of principled opposition to this environment of deflection and post-truth, and reaffirm by way of their works that the core meanings and values of art are, by definition, neither fake nor ‘fake.’ Working across a diverse cross-section of media and styles, these artists taken as a group emphatically assert that genuine cultural significance and social interchange can be achieved through cultural expression. Dissidents exposed in the act of refusing to succumb to cynicism or despair, each participating artist articulates the possibility of hope distilled through the age-old tools of gesture, form, color and sign.
Location:
Ray Smith Studio
261 Bond Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217
