Resist Complacency Consider Urgency

Curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

September 26-October 31, 2009

Opening Reception Saturday September 26, 7:00-10:00pm

Gallery Hours: M-F 11:00am-5:00pm (or by special arrangement)

Featuring: Cal Crawford, Skylar Haskard, Julian Hoeber, Dawn Kasper, Christopher Michlig, Maya Schindler

“Resist Complacency, Consider Urgency”

That’s what I told myself sometime early last fall. I was trying to jolt myself into an action – even if it was just emotional or attitudinal.

I was hoping to find a sense of urgency in my work that would match the charge we were feeling in the community, what with the election coming to a head and the national stakes mounting daily. It felt good to own a sense of urgency, a well of conviction I could act on. It felt good – for a change.

It seems to me that the unstructured, baggy days of an artist’s or writer’s practice – or I should just say my days – are shot through with a tension ricocheting between complacency and urgency, between inertia and decisive agency. Hamlet’s aporia all over again and in miniature. But complacency may not be exactly the right word – it feels right in the political sphere and bears well on the artist’s private life of the mind, but other related words come to mind as well, like lethargy and ennui.

And while that initial directive of resistance followed by consideration puts the emphasis on finding and grabbing a hold of passion and purpose, I am even more interested in the states of being-an-artist (or being-a-writer) which struggle with a lack of urgency, which feel sluggish and depressed, unfocused and unsure of itself, confused and lost. I was thinking about Cal Crawford’s hypnotic strobing projection with the perfect title this is where metaphysics fucked me. It helped to articulate that what matters is the perpetual condition of wrestling with real doubt, self-doubt, facing the difficulty of forging convictions and inventing urgencies, laboring to sustain motivation, and questioning the possibility of revolutionary conviction. It is the consideration, itself, of urgency which burns with a fire and it is the notion of resistance to intellectual appeasement and critical complacency which rouses hope. Resistance today may best be manifest as a personal (which we know is political) act of active and activated, if doubtful, consciousness.

Clearly, these are words aimed at myself that guide the grouping of artists gathered here: Cal Crawford, Skylar Haskard, Julian Hoeber, Dawn Kasper, Christopher Michlig, and Maya Schindler.

- Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Sept 2009