Fuse
February 3, 2017 - April 1, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, February 3, 6:00-9:00 pm
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to present Fuse, an exhibition of artists Cassandra C. Jones and Alfred Steiner, curated by artist and professor at Brandeis University, Todd Pavlisko. Fuse is a coalescence of images that intersect politics and pop culture within the lascivious American backdrop. Sociopolitical messages are interwoven in a cleverly composited miscellany, layering the erotic and whimsical, the beautiful and grotesque.
Cassandra C. Jones manipulates and reconfigures photography to tell new stories about observation and documentation. She transforms subjects captured by others to play unique roles in her work. Sourcing thousands of photographs, both in print and digital form, she explores the contemporary snap-happy impulse to capture and crystalize moments in order to experience them. She weaves together these found images into striking patterns and poetic collages. Good Cheer Wallpaper is a site-specific wallpaper installation that assembles photographs of teenage and adolescent cheerleaders into an array of kaleidoscopic wheels reminiscent of mandalas. The piece examines the uncomfortable yet undeniable relationship between girlhood, family, and pornography inherent in the high-kicks and upskirt flashes of youth cheerleading.
Alfred Steiner’s paintings dissect our culture through intricate, photorealistic watercolors.
Steiner is inspired by the daily exposure to animal mutilation he experienced during his childhood years in rural Ohio—while common in farm life, the concept becomes gruesome when recontextualized in his art. Each element in his work is a disembodied organ of our society, rearranged with others into recognizable forms. Like Jones’ cheerleaders, Steiner’s cartoon characters juxtapose sex and childhood in ways that make the viewer uncomfortable, combining explicit sexual images with nostalgic and contemporary childhood icons. The work is both a compelling image and a scavenger hunt for the eye that confronts the viewer.
Overlapped, Steiner and Jones’ work present an abundance of images that force the viewer to consider every component with focused attention in order to process its content. Each piece unfolds a complex cluster of social messages that infiltrate our cursory habits of perception and comprehension.
Cassandra C. Jones is a California-based artist with an M.F.A. in interdisciplinary fine arts from Carnegie Mellon University. She has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, most recently at the Porch Gallery in Ojai, CA, and Eli Ridgway Gallery in San Francisco, CA. She has received a number of awards and residencies, including the Vira I. Heinz Endowment awarded by the Virginia Center of Creative Arts.
Alfred Steiner is a New York-based artist and lawyer with a J.D. from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA. His work has been exhibited at galleries and museums internationally, most recently Joshua Liner Gallery in New York, NY and Gallery Poulsen in Copenhagen, Denmark.
