Opening Friday January 15, from 6:00 - 9:00 The exhibit runs through Sunday February 14
“All solutions are temporary”
-Anonymous, but everybody seems to say it sooner or later
A lifetime of making a life and art with another person leaves a deep impression on both parties. We are altered by the presence of the other. The scars of our cohabitation become beauty marks, acquired fingerprints that identify us to each other and leave us incompatible with any other person. Nothing is ever settled in any relationship, and everything is up for negotiation, but after awhile a certain understanding is achieved. Lifelong partnerships, those twitchy stalemates with our beloved others, are all too finite, but as long as they do survive they seem to take forever.
OK for Now is a joint installation of sculptures by Matt Freedman and Jude Tallichet, two artists who have spent 30 years deeply involved in each other’s business, rendering their exhibition a kind of conversation of objects between codependents. Using the vertical space of Valentine Gallery to maximum effect, Freedman and Tallichet deploy their pieces at all levels of the cubic volume of the gallery, from the floor to the ceiling, from wall to wall. The two artists have created flimsy support structures that clumsily present the work of the other via the deployment of any number of rickety racks, awkward altars, gimpy gibbets, tippy tripods and frail flagpoles that display and endanger works drawn from the Jude and Matt’s voluminous inventories. The effort is to embrace and enhance the cherished work of the cherished companion, but the result all too often is to distort and endanger that which is adored. The effect is both tender and highly unstable. The pieces seem to be at risk, as is any viewer who might edge cautiously through the space.
Of course, there is no danger. It’s only art, though the effect is real. The illusion of looming disaster can provoke as authentic an embodied response as the real thing. That too is art. The really tricky part was surviving long enough to get here.
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