A Place Called Lovely
curated by Sima Familant
September 9 - October 2, 1999
Artist List
Alex Bag
Julie Becker
Sadie Benning
Mark Bradford
Jonathon Horowitz
Sean Landers
Paul Pfeiffer
Jack Pierson
Sean Snyder
A Place Called Lovely, a group show of American artists, features work which comments on America’s current cultural landscape and investigates the emotional underpinnings of American social realities. Iconic imagery informs the work as quintessentially American, reflecting general trends, attitudes, and effects of living in what has been proposed to be a culturally enlightened gold mine. Inspired by an underground, youth culture glam impulse that is intensely distinctive from the decadent, impersonal art seen in the eighties, the work in this exhibition questions how to situate oneself as an American. It illustrates frustration while being dreamy and mischievous of alternative possibilities. Identifying an evolved and modernized version of success, the works reinterpret the suggestion of an 'American Dream' and contemplate the truism of America as a 'land of opportunity'. These artists acknowledge a diverse group of historical influences who epitomize American art: artists such as Edward Hopper, Bill Owens, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Dan Graham and Richard Prince. The artists in A Place Called Lovely transfer these referential approaches such as melancholy, disenchantment, conceptual investigations of suburbia, and the immediacy of the image into a new dialogue pertinent to recent social events.