ADAM STENNETT, UNDERWATER MOUSE 1, 2003, OIL ON LINEN, 72" X 72"
City Mouse/Country Mouse
Curated by David Hunt
Space 101
101 North 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Tel: 718-218-8211
March 8 -- April 14, 2003
Open Saturday & Sunday Noon-6pm or by appointment
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 8 from 7:00 to 9:00 PM.
City Mouse/Country Mouse explores a single dichotomy in contemporary art practice. On one hand, there appears to be a fascination with rural landscapes, pastoral utopias, and the romantic idealization of country life; on the other, a desire to express an aggressively urban terrain--at once architectonic, design inflected, and keyed to the overwhelming blitzkrieg of images on our city streets. To illustrate these two strains (and further highlight their contrasts) the gallery will be divided into two "territories". The Country Mice, chiefly preoccupied by flora, fauna, ornithology, and what one might term the "agricultural backwoods" will shore up one side of the gallery. The City Mice, exploring urban grids, posh domestic interiors, and the latest advances in digital abstraction, are presented in the rear of the gallery. Splitting the two, is a twenty-five foot floor to ceiling wall by Mick O'Shea. O'Shea's baroque partition contains elements of the urban/industrial--neon signage, faux-brickwork, and remote-controlled battle tanks--as well as the kind of hothouse flowers and streaming fountains one associates with a French countryside manor. His piece suggests both a link between the two competing ideas and a porous boundary.
City Mouse/Country Mouse, as a themed exhibition, does not attempt to make a totalizing case for these ideas. On the contrary, it provides samples as diverse as a Brancusi Endless Column tricked out as a climbing wall for weekend warriors (Ben Beaudoin), and a grid of African-American self-portraits revealing the various masks necessary for continuous self-invention, and indeed, basic urban survival (Jeff Sonhouse). But these are merely samples. Artists reflecting on these two conditions are too numerous, their strategies too varied, and the space too limited to reveal anything more than a partial snapshot. At times it will appear that certain artists are on the wrong side of the gallery, or that a case could be made for classification as both City Mouse and Country Mouse. Not so. Adam Stennett's painting of a rat struggling to the watery surface belongs squarely in our city's fetid sewers, although whether the creature is a harmless, domesticated mouse or a disease-ridden rat seems ambiguous. Likewise, Ned & Shiva Productions's video of a pistol range in the woods, is not an argument for greater gun control or an indictment of the pervasiveness of guns in the inner-city. Instead, it explores a sonic rift in an otherwise bucolic setting, a wormhole in paradise.
Finally, City Mouse/Country Mouse features 28 artists, both emerging and recently established, working in photography, video, painting, and sculpture.
David Hunt is a critic and curator living in New York.
DRIVING DIRECTIONS:
Take the Williamsburg Bridge to
Brooklyn. Take the first exit, Broadway.
Keep right onto Broadway.
Stay on Broadway all the way until the water.
Take a right on Kent Ave.
Take a right on North 3rd St.
Space 101 is on North 3rd between Berry and Wythe.
SUBWAY DIRECTIONS (approx. 5 block walk):
Take L train to Brooklyn.
Get off at the first stop in Brooklyn, Bedford/North 7th.
Walk South to North 3rd St.
Take a right and walk one block past Berry.
Space 101 is on North 3rd between Berry and Wythe.
