Generations of man have attempted to overcome oppression only to be quieted either by overt aggression or by failing to keep hold of ideals in the face of culture’s consolations. Today we knowingly, if not gleefully, submit ourselves to the global panopticon, where the peddlers of vice and the potential for trans-human salvation both reside. Curated by Daniel Wallace and Josh Pavlacky, Temptations draws parallels between the demands for freedom heard from youth culture around the globe and an internal quest for peace as we continue in the cycle of revolt and complacency.
Sculpture and video installed in the gallery reveal an anxious examining of the over-saturated self and an attempted release from our material condition.
Feb 15 – Apr 6
Extra Extra
1524 Frankford Ave
Opening Feb 15
7-10pm
Benjamin Young / Colin Self / Michael Welsh /
Daniel Glendening / Sarah Johnson / Martin Basher
Carlos Gonzalez / Kristin Smallwood / Linda Cordell
Contemporary uprisings have spawned the creation of a simultaneous physical and digital group-mind. Audience members face the persistent nag of culture’s opiates on their path towards a trans-human Operetta inspired by The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
Feb 17
182 Turner Street
Doors Open at 7pm
Performance begins promptly @ 8pm
ATTENTION: PERFORMANCE INCLUDES SEXUALLY EXPLICIT MATERIAL. VIEWERS ARE REQUIRED TO SIGN A WAIVER UPON ADMITTANCE.
Colin Self / Kristin Smallwood / Carlos Gonzalez / James Johnson
I slept again, I think. When I woke up this time and looked up through the leaves overhead, there were vultures. I sighed, indifferent. I was growing used to the pain, or it had lessened. Unimportant. I tried to see myself from the vultures’ viewpoint. I saw, instead, my mother’s eyes. Consuming. I was suddenly her focus of the general meaninglessness – not for myself, not for any quality of my large, shaggy body or my sly, natural mind. I was, in her eyes, some meaning I myself could never know and might not care to know: an alien, the rock broken free of the wall. I slept again.”
—Excerpt from Grendel by John Gardner
