Opening reception: Friday, June 13, 6 - 10 pm
Meet the Artists: Sunday, July 27, 1 - 5 pm
For the upcoming exhibition entitled Peep Show, the gallery has been transformed to simulate the ambiance of a 19th century Victorian bordello. In this exhibit exploring the themes of innocence and deviance, five interdisciplinary artists create an installation that provides an intimate environment to view the exhibition in a setting where sexuality in all its permutations may reside in comfort.Peep Show is a collection of work that draws from social, political, and personal views of the erotic. The works at first may titillate the viewer but after closer inspection they reflect the artists multifaceted view of fetish, sexuality and politics of the body.
Project curator Delia King, muralist and reverse glass painter, created the idea of Peep Show to explore subversive ideas in an elegant and provocative environment reflective of the views of the artists she invited to participate. Recently, she rediscovered an old passion for embellishing furniture and developed the idea for creating a mobile framework for a temporary exhibit. The five artists, George Apotsos, Seth Eisen, Lance Pawling, Kathryn Sclavi and King herself, exhibit a menagerie of intricately created objects that encourage intimate viewing, enhanced by the opulent and sensual environment. Visitors “enter at their own risk” through luxurious curtains into a temporary, Victorian parlor, with faux finished floors and walls adorned with hand-made wallpaper. Flamboyant, redesigned furniture and ornate lighting illuminate this otherwise ordinary exhibition space in West Philadelphia’s 40th St. Artist- in-Residence gallery-AIRSPACE.
Participating artists include:
Delia King is a prolific artist, known for her huge scale murals of social import and her intricate reverse glass paintings. King’s latest glasswork notes within the animal kingdom an encounter between predator and prey, the one who looks away first is dominant. But is the person left looking „Ÿ the prey „Ÿ offering an invitation to be consumed? Is the person who takes, with force, encouraged if it seems to have been offered? The line between the dominant and the submissive remains blurred in the context of sexual play.
George Apotsos is a ceramicist, painter and installation artist. His current work is a response to the globalization of internet usage and the accompanying ease of access to information. His work mirrors an international community of fearless voyeurs peeking in on explicit behaviors once considered private, now willingly offered up for public consumption. In his work, Torso, Apotsos uses the home as a metaphor that depicts a fragmented body on miniature ceramic houses. Torso is a meditation on intimacy through technology and questions the ways in which we attempt to connect while maintaining a safe distance.
Seth Eisen’s work is a hybrid of contemporary forms „Ÿ performance, installation, book arts, and fetish object. A native of Philadelphia, based in San Francisco, his work exposes issues of queer oppression and power, reclaiming queer histories and re-imagining cultural and social norms. His hand-made book Homo of Law deals with the history of gay entrapment, homophobia and hate crimes. Homo of Law is a reconstructed book destroyed by a vandal who destroyed 600 gay, lesbian and feminist books in The San Francisco Public Library. The books were withdrawn from the collection and the vandal was caught and charged with a hate crime. “Eisen attacked the book, cutting out detailed stencils, some illustrating police actions and others showing queer affection. He reduced the rest of the volume to pulp, reconstituting it as handmade paper for an accordion book featuring his stenciled scenes and some original chapter titles (such as "Somatic Techniques of Policing"). The result is a true work of pulp fiction, called The Homosexual(ity) of Law, whose theme suggests parallels between seduction and entrapment torn from the pages of legal history.” -- Carl Nagin, The San Francisco Weekly
Lance Pawling is a performance and installation artist known for his work with the improvisational theater group Dumpsta Players. Pawling’s found-object sculptures are an eclectic romp through the extreme. Evocative, often disturbing, and equally alluring, his work redefines environments by altering living room objects and décor. By rethinking ideas of furniture design Pawling gives his objects a new context in which anachronisms may spawn.
Kathryn Sclavi is a community-based artist and educator whose quirky interactive public art projects work to dismantle the superficial interface between the media and the public. Her new work featured here, Dirty Pictures focuses on photographic images that appear at first harmless, yet provoke a deeper, more disturbing sense of eroticism when further examined. Her work challenges the line between innocence and deviance „Ÿ questioning the gaze of both the viewer and the image maker, revealing the dichotomy between that which is created and that which is perceived.
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