Summer Festival 2009 - Exhibition

The Noble Savage and the Little Tramp 

   August 6 – 30, 2009
   Closing Party August 29 from 4-8pm
     Followed by Kimberly Bartosik performance at 8pm

   Open after performances and on Sundays from
   11-6 or by appointment

   Curated by Hannah Whitaker
   Featuring: Nayland Blake, Lucas Blalock, Gil
   Blank, Caleb Considine, Trisha Donnelly,
   Michaela Fruhwirth, Jonah Groeneboer, Estelle
   Hanania, Anya Kielar, Boru O’Brien O’Connell,
   Arthur Ou, Matthew Porter, Noah Sheldon,
   Mary Weatherford, James Welling and Mark
   Wyse.

Open on Sundays from 11:00 - 6:00, after all performances, or by appointment

The Noble Savage and the Little Tramp is an exhibition of works made through reductive acts in search of the basic, primal, or mechanical. The phrase “noble savage” draws from eighteenth-century notions of the essential goodness of primitive man, uncorrupted by civilization. The Little Tramp is the iconic Charlie Chaplin character who in Modern Times is driven mad by industrial society and eventually abandons it altogether. As a throwback to pre-industrial and industrial eras, the show’s title proposes personal examination (or rejection altogether) of our post-industrial situation. Amidst a global interconnectedness of ever-increasing horror and complexity, the works in the show approach a basic center, where hard meaning can reliably be found, like a rock smoothed by friction. The result is fragmentation without reassembly. This shedding of excess carries an edge of delusion, but knowingly so, since these are acts not of escapism but of affirmation.

A Mount Tremper Arts Commision

CLICK the image below for a online gallery of the exhibition