Power Pathos
dal 7/7/2006 al 23/9/2006
Segnalato da
7/7/2006
Power Pathos
Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston
Work of Daniel Johnston, Ron English, Gibby Haynes, Clark Fox, and Anthony Ausgang. They are longstanding icons of the great American underground, sharing much of their defiant DNA and drawing life-force from the same subversive soul. Their art has served simultaneously as harsh critiques and loving embraces of the society that spawned them.
The Station Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to announce its upcoming group exhibition, Power Pathos, including the work of Daniel Johnston, Ron English, Gibby Haynes, Clark Fox, and Anthony Ausgang. This exhibition will be open to the public during our regular hours beginning Wednesday, June 21, 2006 - we invite you to observe Ron English create a new mural based on Pablo Picasso's Guernica. An artist reception will be held on Saturday, July 8th with music, refreshments, and artcars.
Daniel Johnston, Ron English, Gibby Haynes, Clark Fox, and Anthony Ausgang are longstanding icons of the great American underground, sharing much of their defiant DNA and drawing life-force from the same subversive soul. These one-time counter-cultural celebrities have created their own self-aware, yet sincere, mythologies that have propelled them into the mainstream of America and the world. Their art has served simultaneously as harsh critiques and loving embraces of the society that spawned them, art that has been a blend of reality and artifice, of vision and delusion, of power and pathos, five artists whose artistic powers were forged here in the naturally surreal Lone Star state.
Through their art and music these artists have provided both the visual touchstones demarking the edges of accepted reality and the siren soundtrack that drew us beyond. Their visions have manifested as silent films projected into the dark shadows cast by the society of the perpetual spectacle, as the unwelcome laugh-track to the pseudo-serious discourse of high art and as the unwanted interventions in the dictatorial manipulations of Madison Avenue. Here are artists who have been able to stretch the apocryphal facade of post-modern culture thin enough to provide the transparence necessary to expose the mythological gilded skeletal birdcage housing the oxygen deprived delusions and the canonized neurological misfires that masquerade as modern society’s immortal soul.
- Ron English
Drawn by the boundless attributes handed down through generations of comic books, the unabatedly honest work of Daniel Johnston, who currently lives in Texas, mirrors the imperfections and the capricious idiosyncrasies adherent to life, and from that arises in Johnston a suitable rhetoric to an epic struggle of opposition, division, and, above all else, an endearment of the world.
With his liberation of public billboards, renowned surrealist painter Ron English has prevailed against corporate America as an infamous outlaw artist subverting the pop culture that projects onto our urban landscape. While addressing these accepted corporeal relationships distributed throughout our environment, English’s revamping of popular consumer icons disrupts the privatization of metropolitan de'cor and capacitates the reclamation of our surroundings.
The enlivened work of former Butthole Surfers front-man Gibby Haynes threads lyrical imagery over the colorfully saturated veneer of his paintings, capturing the raw, poetic animation of his psyche.
The work of former Texas resident Clark Fox deconstructs corporate emblems and utilizes their basic constituents to explore and redefine our social and political identity.
Having grown up in Texas, Anthony Ausgang is a Los Angeles-based artist whose cartoon-inspired works stem from the struggles of living, often through the vivacious anthropomorphism of cats. “My use of cartoon characters is an attempt to explain the human condition, the unheralded heroics of just staying alive, without resorting to the overt, hammer on the head use of we, the people." - Anthony Ausgang
Through their exploration of cultural iconography, these five artists have come to represent the modern archetypes of the eternally independent spirit, and Power Pathos is a step towards just that - this hybrid: a mythological beast split from art and music, a profound unease between the social disorders of the streets and the disconcerting internal environment of its subconscious.
Station Museum
1502 Alabama Houston, TX 77004
Free Admission: Wednesday - Sunday, 11am - 6pm
The Station is open Wednesday - Sunday, 11am - 6pm. We are located in Midtown at the corner of Alabama & La Branch. Admission is free, and we are happy to schedule tours.