Hauntology
curated by Buzz Spector
Jacques Derrida offered us the term hauntology 25 years ago, describing how any attempt to locate origins or histories is dependent on (always) already existing language , which make "haunting the state proper to being as such." What haunts us now is not the past but the failure of the future we dreamed of to materialize. As another cultural theorist, Mark Fischer, puts it, "the future is always experienced as a haunting," so for artists depicting waking dreams, different imaginative spaces or alternative worlds, questions of "when" as much as "where" or "whom" subtly haunt artworks of this exotic scenario or that. The artists I have selected each aspire to make sense of the world while simultaneously drawing forth specters of its often displaced reality.
featuring:
Phyllis Bramson
Lisa Corinne Davis
Harley Lafarrah Eaves
Vernon Fisher
Julie Heffernan
Maria Tomasula
Phyllis Bramson
Lisa Corinne Davis
Harley Lafarrah Eaves
Vernon Fisher
Julie Heffernan
Maria Tomasula
Phyllis BramsonPhyllis Bramson’s paintings are suffused with Asian art and Pop depictions. They make reference to the posing languors of 19th-century Orientalism, but are less tied to particular East- or South-Asian motifs than to the intersection of their otherness with deeply personal reveries. Their stillness seems arrested, as if Bramson’s figures have stopped what they’re doing because of our presence.
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Lisa Corinne DavisLisa Corinne Davis brings abstraction’s structural similarities to mapping and flow charts into paintings that resonate as well with geographies of identity and subjectivity. Her work challenges the complacent decorativeness of some contemporary abstraction, inviting critical readings of their subtly topographical elements. They shorten the time between where we think we are and where we are going.
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Harley Lafarrah EavesHarley Lafarrah Eaves provides the title for this project in his continuing series of “Hauntology” paintings that make reference to modern ghost stories and to “The Wizard of Oz.” His art makes us notice the production of nostalgia as an operation of contemporary Capitalist futurism, offered in atmospheres redolent of German Romanticism or depictions of alien worlds.
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Vernon FisherVernon Fisher’s art contains elements of conceptual language and installation, rendered with virtuoso draftsmanship. The satirical wit in his pictures is present in a vernacular that is distinctive in outlook and irony, and haunted by images whose place and time remain ambiguous. The stories in Fisher’s paintings are told through vignettes, diagrams, and various cursive or typographical alphabets, but their narratives are always Fisher’s own.
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Julie HeffernanJulie Heffernan’s self-portraiture is as thorough in its Feminist critical/theoretical awareness as it is sensuously garrulous. Heffernan’s art- and political/historical knowledge is referenced in the iconography enveloping her figure, but viewing her canvases as exercises in critical reading shouldn’t distract us from their voluptuous material presence. She depicts the future as a kind of ripening through references to such previous Feminist tours de force as Carolee Schneemann’s 1975 Interior Scroll.
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Maria TomasulaMaria Tomasula’s selection of drawings and a painting reveals Tomasula’s absorption with process and detail in Surrealistically tinged arrangements of objects. These phantasmagoric still-lifes are both vividly rendered and arduously textured. Their arrays of organic remnants evoke opened bodies, but the surgery here is of an existential rather than physiological import.
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