ID @ Projects Gallery

ID @ Projects Gallery
629 N 2nd St
Philadelphia, PA 19123

June 6 - July 26, 2008
First Friday Opening:
June 6th 5 - 8 PM!!

"Black Iconography" performance by Samantha Hill June 6th, 7PM.
Summer gallery hours are Thursday and Friday 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday noon to 7 p.m.

For the summer season, Projects Gallery is pleased to announce a collaboration with curators Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof entitled “ID”. This exhibition will showcase emerging Philadelphia artists united in pushing the boundaries ofmyth and persona in contemporary art. Fresh from various Philadelphia-area art colleges and programs, these artists embrace the ethos of the MySpace generation. Utilizing video, performance, sculpture and photography, “ID” explores broad and self-focused concepts ranging from issues of applied identity to the id of the artist. As put succinctly by the curators, “the works are metaphorical in ways that come out of the core of who they are and what they see around them.”

Image: Jamie Diamond, The Raddisons, 40" H x 60" W, photographic print

True to the zeitgeist, the artists use the self to express the political, environmental and personal. Documenting the seemingly mundane of the everyday, these works morph into an escapist fantasy. As Fallon and Rosof state, “their art is questioning their relationship to their families and friends, to the past, to the city, to the camera even.” Whether fabricating an alternate persona through video, documenting a false or surrogate family through photography, or constructing impossible landscapes of impractical materials, the artists express experience via the filter of their own “ID”. Through the embrace of the self-as-subject, these young artists confront the contemporary world by retreating into one of their own creation.

Artists include from Moore College of Art and Design, Samantha Hill; from Tyler School of Art, Andria Bibiloni and Carl Marin; from The University of the Arts Jay Hardman, Alex Gartelmann and Phil Jackson; and from University of Pennsylvania Jamie Diamond, Katy Rose Glickman and Sarah Zimmer; from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Philadelphia-based artist Diedra Krieger – all representing the spectrum of the Philadelphia art experience.

Image: Andria Bibiloni, Blaster Bike, dimensions variable, mixed media.

Curators' Statement: The young artists in this show, most of them newly-graduated from art schools in Philadelphia are myth-makers, creating alternate universes and alternate personas. Some of them make work touched by the idea of faux. Unlike Matthew Barney and Matthew Ritchie, both of whom mythologize on a grandiose scale, these artists mythologize on an intimate personal scale. It doesn't mean their works are small or lacking in ambition. The works are metaphorical in ways that come out of the core of who they are and what they see around them.

Their art is questioning their relationship to their families and friends, to the past, to the city, to the camera even. These are not future-focused works, nor are they nostalgic particularly. Some of them may strike you as forlorn. But they're tough works and realistic. They're smacking upside the head the Leave It to Beaver cultural imperative.

The reception is free and open to the public. For more information or images, please contact Projects Gallery at 267-303-9652 or info@projectsgallery.com.