A Cage Went in Search of a Bird (Franz Kafka), curated by Sarah Walko
May 10 – June 19, 2013 at Radiator Arts, 10-61 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11106
Artists: Eve Bailey, Rachel Bernstein, Ryan V. Brennen, Diana Heise, Roxanne Jackson , Coralina Meyer, Sono Osato, Malingering Uvula (Camilla Ha and Michael Merck) and Gabriela Vainsencher.
The exhibition “The City of K. Franz Kafka and Prague” permanently on display at the Kafka Museum was the impetus for this exhibition. Kafka’s relationship with cities through his surreal lens coupled with his imagination and during the context of his time brought the simultaneous nightmare/dreamscape of the budding technological age into the realm of the real in his stories, projecting super psyches onto our cities.
The artists in this exhibition are all exploring the surreal space of our time now. Large cultural and philosophical shifts due to massive environmental and economic challenges and the level of technology we are reaching and working with daily is all ushering in new branches of consciousness and new approaches to how we live. The artists, like Kafka did, address our current cosmic predicament in various ways; our relationship with nature, our relationship to self within today’s technological tools, and with objects of alchemical/shamanic ritual and ceremony. They are writing out the dreamscapes of our now and a vision of the future that lacks the pasts’ patriarchal aesthetic and imagines the opening up of a future with more feminine traits, including acts of reclamation and the healing of our past and ourselves within our cities.
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Eve Bailey constructs fixed rules that guide her experimentation and free her unconscious in the process of making her cartographic and anatomical drawings. As she does so, she finds herself in territories more elaborate than she would have consciously conceived of, uncovering more layers of the labyrinthine complexity of both the body and the structure of cities the deeper she delves. As an alchemist would, she takes her own body as a point of departure. The lines represent the bones, muscles and organs intertwining thus creating a framework. Each architectural pattern is carefully chosen for its geometric qualities and its relevance. The series mixes the visceral, metaphorically and the intellectual with systems of representation; blueprints and geometry. The drawing creates a bridge between the physicality of the body and a very interior world with the relentless activity of the mind within an exterior blueprint. In her own words “It’s my way of trying to heal from the insanity of the scattered world around us, from the ambient disparity between the natural world and the constructed world.”