Sometimes, it seems like the entirety of the art business is anchored in exciting conversations. My first hint of this notion appeared at a meal celebrating a now-acclaimed artist friend’s first post-MFA group show. Dinner parties with my lawyer colleagues were brilliant, if buttoned-up, but that evening, artists and their seemingly infinite supply of Big Ideas generated a kaleidoscopic new set of possibilities for me. Was it true that you (I?) could live a life in art?
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A few years into writing about art and curating exhibitions, I was seated across from a person who would go on to become a dear mentor and friend at a dinner celebrating our mutual friend’s inclusion in a particular confluence of German-based international art exhibitions. Having had so much fun discussing art at the intersection of American and European politics, the next day we drove to the opening of Skulptur Projekte Münster. This still counts as one of my favorite exhibition experiences/adventures in recent memory.
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Now that epidemiological concerns preclude both a physical exhibition and the centerpiece event marking Gallery Kendra Jayne Patrick’s first fall exhibition for one of the wildest art seasons on record, it feels important to use this opportunity to actively seek new means for fostering consequential art dialogue. Seating Chart for a Fall Dinner Party in a Pandemic, then, is an ode to the thrilling possibilities springing from dinner conversations I’ve experienced all throughout my life and work with art. It’s an exhibition of pairs, each featuring one object by one artist in each gallery’s respective orbit. In this configuration, the works are afforded an intimate, intricate dialogue, in much the same way as the artists themselves might be, were they afforded physical and temporal proximity.
–Kendra Jayne Patrick
gallerykendrajaynepatrick.com
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Kenya (Robinson) & Cindy Sherman
A ∩ B art: The mechanization of enigma; exploitation of the malleability of identity and privilege
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: Is “Karen” a slur or a joke?
Arden Surdam & Bas Jan Ader
A ∩ B art: Positioning photography specifically in relationship to time
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: Joshua Citarella, Gregory Crewsdon, photoshop
Wickerham & Lomax & Isaac Julien
A ∩ B art: Mythmaking; black storytelling tropes and tradition
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: This latest era/iteration of diasporic Black Pride; West African mythology
Gernot Bubenik & Trevor Paglen
A ∩ B art: The American Century; state-sanctioned science; aestheticization of technology
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: “Westworld;” Julian Assange
!Mediengruppe Bitnik & Louise Lawler
A ∩ B art: Making art with machines; Fluxus ideology in digitized art
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: Facial recognition software; 3D printing; Alan Kaprow
Jo Shane & B. Wurtz
A ∩ B art: Effective post-minimal strategy; distinctive post-minimal philosophy
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: The new MoMA’s new Donald Judd retrospective; gendered consumerism
A ∩ B art: post-minimal seriality; the Keepsake
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: No Wave bands at Artists Space in the late 70s
Kenya (Robinson) & B. Wurtz
A ∩ B art: Americana; American consumer culture
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: The Dollar Store; plastic as the most plentiful material on earth
Halim Flowers & André Butzer
A ∩ B art: color theory, skeptical painting
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: Netflix comedy specials, Michael Krebber
SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY & Bas Jan Ader
A ∩ B art: Finding empathy in irony; the tragicomic gesture
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: YouTube; Stoicism; Trigger Warnings
Qualeasha Wood & Paulina Olowska
A ∩ B art: The contemporary female gaze
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: Instagram and the female form; Instagram and the broad proliferation in plastic surgery mimicking of the Black female form; Lana Del Rey, Cardi B, and feminism
SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY & Cindy Sherman
A ∩ B art: sex as performance; the interplay between public and private sexual identity
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: WAP-related fanfare, Andrea Frasier, ”Untitled” 2003
!Mediengruppe Bitnik & Gary Simmons
A ∩ B art: Textual aesthetics
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: politicians on Twitter, “Cancel Culture;” digital language in an analog reality
Gernot Bubenik & Halim Flowers
A ∩ B art: Symbology; superstructures governing Western life
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: Comic Books, hieroglyphics
Wickerham & Lomax & Camille Henrot
A ∩ B art: Artmaking in the liminal space between digital and analog life; abjection via the absurd
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: ”The Swan;” TikTok
Arden Surdam & Trevor Paglen
A ∩ B art: Nature in contemporary art; 21st century capitalism and nature
A ∩ B dinner party conversation: NASA sends algae to space
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