I’m cross-posting this from the AGCC blog. I’m going to bed tonight an especially happy little curator, looking very much forward to two shows that I’m obscenely proud of.
We finished hanging Benicia Gantner & Kim Schoenstadt today, and I’m in a deep state of curatorial satisfaction. When you bring together two artists, who don’t know one another, who live in different cities, on the premise that there’s the potential for a real and meaningful conversation between their work, you entertain a potential for failure, or less catastrophically, disappointment. Even more so when the key works in the exhibition are new and site specific. You literally don’t know what you’re going to get. So entering the gallery this morning, and seeing Benicia’s completed vinyl wall drawings, a wave of pleasure passed over me. It works. Everything just looks so good together.
Seeing Benicia and Kim’s works together, I’m unable to stop finding commonalities and meaningful contrasts. Kim’s work is starkly archiectural, composed of shapes and elements either wholly man-made or mediated by human action. Even the plants are mediated and controlled, the flora of landscaping, divorced from any wild natures. Her whole contribution to the exhibition a room-scale, site-specific work (seen below), which surrounds and focuses the viewer.
In contrast, Benicia’s contribution to the exhibition is a pair of site-specific vinyl on wall pieces and 13 vinyl on panel pieces. They explode with the chaos of nature, biomorphic shapes roiling and flowing together, the horizon lines and the composition of landscape suggests the fantasy of worldbuilding. There is a sense of out-of-control growth and expansion in her works, of a world unmediated by the ordering of human action that Kim’s work so bluntly portrays.
I could go on, and I probably will later, but I’m really excited to see the viewer reaction when the show is opened to the public tomorrow (Opening at 2PM, Saturday, November 17). Also opening is Printmaker in Residence: Dirk Hagner. Dirk’s woodcut portraits are masterful, and I feel that their focus on figure is an excellent paring to Benicia and Kim’s work.
Above – Restoration Selections (East, West, South), by Kim Schoenstadt.
Above – Hyperblossom.1, by Benicia Gantner.