Featuring the work of Josh Faught, Josh Mannis, and William John O'Brien
Opening Reception Saturday April 28th, 8 - 10 pmSecond Gallery is pleased to present a group show of new work by Josh Faught, Josh Mannis, and William John O'Brien. Josh Mannis will present digital prints and a new video; Josh Faught and William John O'Brien will build new installations in the Second Gallery space. This group exhibition realizes one of Second Gallery's founding goals: to provide time and space for artists to create new site-specific works that allow them to advance their artistic practice while interfacing with one another. The anticipated result will be a finished exhibition that serves as a positive step forward for the individual artists as well as a forum for the growth of new collaborative possibilities.
Josh Faught, Josh Mannis, and William John O'Brien live and work in Chicago, lL and received Masters of Fine Arts degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the department of Fiber and Material Studies. While each artist will be contributing an independent project to the show, years of working side by side will provide conceptual and material resonances between each project. In a general sense, the work of these three artists is concerned with the ways in which identity and memory operate within the landscape of popular culture as it has unfolded through history, and the dissonances herein. Each artist in his own way critically examines the roles of gender, otherness, and societal categorizations though the lens of the materials of the worlds in which they came of age as men.
Josh Faught's installations, sculptures, and drawings engage with political/queer theory, personal histories, and the history of textiles. Faught's work explores problematic cultural notions of craft and craft making in conjunction with personal sites of domestic dysfunction. Radiating in notions of camp and hysteria, objects and ornamentation are re-configured to rhapsodize over codes of depression, desire, illness, loss, tragedy, and criminality. Faught utilizes fiber-based processes such as hand and Jacquard weaving, knitting, crocheting, macramé, screen-printing, and repeat building, resulting in works that are as intimate as they political. Faught has exhibited in such venues as Booster and Seven, Betty Rymer Gallery, and The Baltimore Museum of Art.
Josh Mannis' digital prints, drawings, sculptures, and videos explore contemporary liberal notions of freedom. Mannis' work draws on sources as diverse as American drug culture, Rock n' Roll, ideas of The Primitive, children's books and toys, comic books and science fiction films, as well as liberalism itself, in an effort to critically engage with the mythos of "acting natural' and "getting free," as they emerged from his own liberal middle-class upbringing. Mannis is represented by 40,000 in Chicago, IL, and has exhibited widely at spaces including Small A projects, Western Exhibitions, Bucket Rider Gallery, The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, and has shown with Milwaukee's General Store.
William John O'Brien's installations, videos, collages, and drawings take as their objects of inquiry ritual, artifact, personal history, masculinity, hysteria, the erotic, and the history of American spiritual psychadelia. His installations, which generally contain all the media he works in, as well as light and sound, create altar-environments busy with odd combinations of items, images, Xerox's, and patterns that create rich and dissonant fragmented cultural memory-scapes. O'Brien has exhibited in many galleries and museums including The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Locust Projects, Ingalls and Associates, Nina Menocal Projects, Glasgow School of Art, Gallery 40000, and Participant, Inc.
Josh Faught, Josh Mannis, William John O'Brien <> April 28th - May 26th, 2007 <> Opening Reception Saturday April 28th, 8 - 10 pm. Gallery talk with artists and curator 6:30 - 8 pm <> Gallery hours: Wed - Sat, noon - 6 pm.
Second Gallery The Distillery 516 East 2nd Street South Boston, MA 02127
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