Sarah Frost, Nadja Verena Marcin, Ash Sechler

Curated by Guillermo Creus

The title of the exhibition plays with the most immediate aspects that come to mind when considering the artworks selected for this project.

Sarah Frost’s piece for the show, a close-to-real scale paper model of a handheld heavy artillery machine gun (6 M2 .50cal Browning) carry, even if only metaphorically, the idea of targeting, shooting and killing. Like an anthropologist, Frost re-presents found forms by methodically creating provocative gun forms inspired by online sources. Talking about her work, the artist states: “Rather than making representations to create an art object, I accumulate cast-off objects that already exist. I choose them for their history, evidence of use and what they imply about their users. I then re-present these items in a different form and context.”

Nadja Verena Marcin’s video performance piece Grand Slam (2011) places the artist in a fierce tennis match where the artist opposes the viewer in the game. The video shows us a female combating with the emotional demands of the game. She confronts the darkness with her physicality, striking powerfully against an undefined space that resounds in terrifying echoes. The sensual dynamics engage the viewer into being ally and opponent. Marcin’s body of work, without being explicitly political, maintains a personal and firm correlation with historical feminist theories and practices creating as a result a new and very personal and contemporary feminist premise of her own.

Ash Sechler will create a sculptural piece made of a thousand one dollar bills. The piece touches a few aspects of the monetary value of an artwork, the relationship of art and money, and the tension that money brings to life, specifically to an artist’s life. Money is, after all, the ultimate tool for survival. The artist states: “The value of the piece will be brought to question. In one sense, the bills have a practical value. Said value is, however, faith based, illusory and appropriate for the traditional trompe l'oeil of the gallery where there is separation between perception and materiality.” In another sense, as a work of art, the piece could be valued for more than its practical amount.

Through each of the pieces in this exhibition, the artists will poke at and directly address the gallery audience’s reactions to the artworks within the safety of a gallery setting, but at the same time transport the viewers outside of their own comfort zone. By engaging through different conscious choices of metaphorical violence – which is in many cases the driving force of the artists themselves - these works play within a pathos that, somehow jokingly, creates a degree of tension in its audience by visually and physically engaging them into the (visual) space that the artwork owns.