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1/12/2001

Peppermint

Smack Mellon Studios, New York

Smack Mellon Studios presents Peppermint, an exhibition that embraces a critical view around fetishism by the artists Linda Cummings, Nicolás Dumi-Estévez, Joy Episalla, Janine Gordon, Kelly Hashimoto, Pablo Helguera, Jana Leo, Angel Marcos, Karen Mahaffy, Edgar Orlaineta, Ernesto Pujol, Raven Scholossberg, and Su-en Wong.
Curated by Dermis Leon

Peppermint presents artists who use diverse ways to depict or translate a personal experience in relation to their cultural background, gender, and sexual positioning. Each artist conveys different perspectives and contradictions of a work of art as it relate to the human body as the focus of meaning. The exhibition attempts to decode cultural stereotypes and commodity through the subtle assumption of desires in images.

Linda Cummings' black and white photographs register ‘the falling of a slip’ as a gesture of a feminine presence in places with significant male-associated or male-constructed spaces such as the romantic landscape or a stadium. Karen A. Mahaffy uses the relationship between objects and their identification with gender in her delicate and subtle installations. By utilizing domestic, repetitive, sugar-made patterns, and intimate feminine under cloths she transforms the architectural view of the space. Pablo Helguera's boxes play with the relationship between the appearance and the real, bringing to us the obsession with the fantasized object, and the deceptive and surprising experience of the real. On the contrary, Jana Leo's installation offers a space of possibilities. Leo creates an anonymous space for touching encounters, playing with the idea of pleasure in unexpected contact. The idea of photography as a flat surface and the image of a fabric skin-like surface in Joy Episalla's photographs, trigger the touching and sensual relationships that we have with the objects that surround us in our private domain. Documentary photography in Janine Gordon’s work becomes an exploration of her sexual fetishes through a voyeuristic approach to male sexual behavior and exhibitionism of a built body. Ernesto Pujol's photograph series of bathrooms situate fragments of the male body in an aseptic and minimal environment, creating a perverse tension between strident cleanness and the voyeuristic gay gaze. Nicolás Dumi-Estévez's complex performances and videos deconstruct the sexual, political, and ideological stereotypes behind the cultural identification of tropical fruits, vegetables, and "Latino" sexuality. Likewise, the sensual and delicate drawings of Sue-en Wong portray Western fetishism and exoticism of Oriental women and culture through depictions of Asian decorative motive and self-portraiture. Using a corporate model of efficiency to measure an intimate relationship, the pleasure received by the occasional lover, Kelly Hashimoto creates computer-generated graphics and web-site links that reveal banal photographs of places and narratives of multiple encounters. Hashimoto analyses with irony as well as humor, the predominant economic fetish on our private life. Angel Marcos appropriates advertisement strategies in his large format photographs that comment on the displacement of desire, from a real object to an idealized representation. Using cutting images from magazines and newspaper, Raven Schlossberg creates a "horror vacuum", a complex and compulsive collage of images. Schlossberg's images represent the overwhelming presence of sexual associations in our life through mass media, fairy tales in children's books, and the influence of American Pop culture. On the other hand, Edgar Orlaineta's ambiguous sculptures are kinds of dysfunctional toys that recall Japanese cartoons, but with a suggestive sexual appearance.

Smack Mellon Studios is a 501(c)(3) Non-profit Contemporary Arts Organization located in the D.U.M.B.O. section of Brooklyn, New York. Conceived in 1995 as a multidisciplinary exchange between visual artists and musicians, it has evolved into an organization whose mission is to nurture and support emerging and mid-career artists by providing access to technology and studio space necessary for the realization of ambitious multidisciplinary projects.

Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Sunday 12-6pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 1, 6-9PM
Performance by Nicolas Dumi Estevez 7:30 - 8:30

Smack Mellon 70 Washington Street Brooklyn, New York 11201

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