off the pedestal
August 1 @ 12:00 pm – October 5 @ 7:00 pm
off the pedestal is a group exhibition in the Media Art Gallery, comprising contemporary artists whose work addresses the national conversation around monuments. Works featured in this exhibition include:
A two-channel video Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality by New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society that works with networks of informants and accomplices to create grounds for Indigenous futures. Crimes Against Reality focuses on two public sculptures by James Earle Fraser — End of the Trail (1894), a statue originally intended to be installed on the California coast at the scale of the Statue of Liberty, and the statue of Theodore Roosevelt (1939) that was removed from outside the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, in 2022 — both of which commemorate the origin myth of America.
Laura Anderson Barbata Intervention: Indigo presents a call to action to serve and protect in response to police violence. The point of departure is the color Indigo, a dye used around the globe that has been associated with protection, wisdom and royalty. Created in in collaboration with the Brooklyn Jumbies, Chris Walker and Jarana Beat, Indigo was performed first in Brooklyn and again in Mexico City in 2020 in collaboration with muca Roma, Chris Walker, Los Diablos de la Costa de Guerrero Los Rebeldes de El Capricho, Elizabeth Ross, Danza UNAM and Pro-Alterne Teatro. The work is a call to action to serve and protect, and of protest in response to the violence and murder at the hands of the police of Black people living in the United States and all over the world.
Paula J. Wilson fuses wide-ranging techniques and media with her observations of the natural world, where it is a matter of survival to make space for oneself to live, love, and make art. Recurring themes of feminine power, natural life systems, and art-making itself converge under the umbrella of regeneration and change. Narrative artworks that place feminine subjects in positions of power. Her expansive practice forcefully proclaims her place in the (art) histories she engages.
