MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY
Curated by Klaus Kertess
Opens October 26, 2006

Click to see exhibition catalogue.

We seem to be residing in a world in which nature has frequently come to be referred to as a terrorist; and terrorism has come to be thought of as natural. Tornadic conditions prevail spiritually, mentally, and physically. Now directly, now obliquely, now with humor, never preaching, the artists included in the opening exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art - Detroit, explore this dark moment. With the exception of the young Japanese animator Tabaimo who is only33, the artists contributing to this venture are celebrated, mid career practitioners.

We start with two who scavenge, Los-Angeles-based Mark Bradford makes vast shimmering collage paintings out of torn and worn and shredded posters -- posters that once advertised sneakers and other sports paraphernalia so often associated with African American culture. Bradford literally and figuratively tears racial stereotypes apart while expanding and revitalizing the technique of collage so much a part of the development of White-dominated modernism. Nari Ward has salvaged materials as varied as baseball bats, fire hoses, baby carriages, and burned out television sets, from the streets of Harlem, transforming his finds into unexpected metaphor. In Detroit, he will work with waterlogged and/or pulverized ceiling panels that have fallen to the floor of MOCAD's space to create an 'oasis.'

In his various video works, Paul Pfeiffer has, amongst much else, explored the ghostlike residue of what remains after fame, begging questions about the substance of our culture. Roxy Paine's outrageously complex computer-driven mechanisms might turn our ecological folly into an erosion machine or the luxury objects of art into infinitely extending multiplicity as his drawing, painting, and sculpture machines so relentlessly do. Jon Pylypchuk's anthropomorphized animal breeds look like the ultimate revenge of our childhood teddy bear friends, as they too have grown up and revel in their human dereliction. Tabaimo's remarkable animations reach back to 18th and 19th century Japanese woodblock prints to lyrically explore her culture's exploitation of women or the fragility of our mortality. More influenced by contemporary Japanese anime as well as Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera, Barry McGee muralizes a nomadic tribe of street people prone to claiming their space with graffiti, the heroic writing of the alienated. Christopher Fachini riffs on the ghetto centric, reggae inspired, sound systems that first expressed Jamaican independence. Following that tradition, and relating it to Detroit, he weaves rebellious joy together with potential to rebuild, reconfigure, reconstruct. Kara Walker enlightens the humble craft of cutout silhouettes. Her rapier humor, agile draftsmanship, and exaggeration, construct a discomforting fairytale, which questions the historic clichØs of slavery, sex, and more. Now she raises the volume of her Black mastery into riveting filmic animation.

None of these artists provide us with answers but rather seduce us with questions, alarm us into beauty and hold up a mirror to our consciousness.