R O U N D  W E A T H E R

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The Works is Round Weather’s first show extracted from its wonderland of Works Available.  From our first year’s seven group exhibitions, The Works forms new chords between high notes by Miguel Arzabe, Todd Bartel, Ajit Chauhan, Christina Conklin, Sylvia Fein, Suzan Frecon, Colter Jacobsen, Jenny Kendler, Gabriela Gonzalez Leal, Terri Loewenthal, Daniela Naomi Molnar, Nkiruka Oparah, Susan Smith,

Rosie Lee Tompkins, Andy Vogt, David Wilson, and Vanessa Woods.  

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The greatest commonality of a majority of the artworks gathered here is their incorporation of found objects, materials, and images.  Collage makes many an appearance.  Another way the works overlap might be the opposite of found: art made from paints and inks that the artists themselves concoct like magic potions.  Sometimes they take these materials’ ingredients (like oak gall, earth pigment, and rainwater) directly from the natural world.  Art of the debatably late Anthropocene had best embrace the common place.

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Think of Picasso's use of newspaper, Betye Saar's Aunt Jemima figurines, and Nicholas Galanin's taxidermy polar bear.  For over a century, found matter has been part and parcel of the kind of art in the West that aims to enter fine art museums.  Look around any city or countryside, and the found has at least as long been a favorite approach of artists far outside the establishment and its avant-gardes.  Meanwhile, the hoarding of capital and perverse gospels of speed, convenience, and high or low costs have ravaged our earth, oceans, and atmosphere.  They've hurt whole peoples too, and from such populations outsider artists of the found often grow.  On occasion these artists' work later gains entry to the mythological category of fine art.  Foundling art was here all along as a tender harbinger of humanity's inevitable return to sustainability. 

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The found can be downright redemptive, and it’s not too late.  Songs of experience are also songs of innocence.  We warmly invite you to see what other soul-demanding and eye-enlivening connections can be found throughout The Works.  We dedicate this exhibition to the memory of Rosie Lee Tompkins and during its run are offering through Bonhams Auction House a quilt she salvaged from her children’s clothes.

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