Night

The sun and the moon jockey dusk and dawn, flowers close, insects sing, another day on earth ends. In this exhibition the artists punch and pull at light and dark and many at the fade between. Some confront the night straight on while others use hidden cameras and deep internal dialogue. When the light goes out it is prime time for going dark and under the influence, out come the nocturnes, the hiders and the hallucinations of night.

Night, curated by Michael Krueger, brings together ten artists whose contributions cultivate diverse conceptual, political, hallucinatory and literal depictions of night. The artists in this exhibition include Glen Baldridge, (Brooklyn, NY), William S. Burroughs (Lawrence, KS), Claudia Casarino (Asuncion, Paraguay), Chris Duncan (Oakland, CA), Lois Keeler (Seattle, WA), Misha Kligman (Kansas City, MO), Alex Kvares (Brooklyn, NY), Sean McFarland (San Francisco, CA), Louise Sheldon (Brooklyn, NY) and David Smith (Brooklyn, NY). 

Chris Duncan’s large sun drenched fabric painting is a reminiscing on both dusk and dawn, while made from the very opposite of night. Claudia Casarino’s room sized installation, Uniform, hauntingly conjures the laborers of night, crossing boarders and donning service uniforms. The elegance and beauty of Uniform momentarily masks the politics of immigration, no rest, no safe passage only the fleeting cover of night. Glen Baldridge uses hidden cameras to catch arbitrary glimpses of nature at night, stark and bleached flashes of unnatural vision. Alex Kvares, William S. Burroughs, Louise Sheldon and Misha Kligman re-dream the mythic power of night shadows and play soothsayer to the creatures of the night. The Baldridge, Smith, Sheldon collaborative photograph, R.I.P. (Boner) puts some edge on the night and beautifies our long tradition of slipping off into nightly intoxicated states. Sean McFarland captures the moments between light and dark, pushing the threshold of vision and saturated colors that will be blown out by the light. Lois Keeler’s soft and subtle lithograph was the inspiration for the exhibition, Keeler’s oeuvre is dense with depictions of nature and intimate views from a low squat, in this piece we are lulled by the muted beauty of her lines and tones and drift; drift through the smoke dark, softly reminded that Night is everyday.