Soft Fantasy/Hard Reality
Soft Fantasy / Hard Reality starts out with an initial set of binaries: softness and hardness, fantasy and reality. This set of relations can be extended to its cognates: immateriality / materiality, fictive / factual, or even concept / form. These binaries structure categories and value-systems, structure our encounter with the world at large. Soft Fantasy / Hard Reality interrogates these binaries and attempts to loosen the hold of these categories in our encounters with matter and milieu.
Presenting a roster of artists who work across a variety of practices, media, and forms: from painting to sculpture, installation, moving image, and performance, the exhibition attends to the ways in which artists mediate this initial binary, working through the certainty of its polar distinction and proffering instead a more open-ended encounter with, on one hand, what may be considered 鈥渟oft fantasy鈥� and 鈥渉ard reality鈥� and, on the other, what may be found in between, alongside, or in the wake of unsettling these categories through the performative, the archival, or the mythological.
The titular typographic slant offers a framework to map out these mediations. On the one hand, it cleaves the two phrases, creating distinction between them. On the other, it stages the juxtaposition between them, coalescing the separate categories into a network of differential relations. Soft Fantasy / Hard Reality leans into this rhetorical slippage which leads us from the binary structure to these categories鈥� troubling, or else misrecognition. The exhibition itself flags the preciousness and precariousness of this juxtaposition and in its place offers ways in which the hardness of reality becomes fugitive trace or the softness of fantasy constitutes uncompromising matter. The exhibition, in this sense, is a study of these displacements鈥搊r how reality and fantasy become both soft and hard, concept and form.
Recommended for you
Soft Fantasy / Hard Reality starts out with an initial set of binaries: softness and hardness, fantasy and reality. This set of relations can be extended to its cognates: immateriality / materiality, fictive / factual, or even concept / form. These binaries structure categories and value-systems, structure our encounter with the world at large. Soft Fantasy / Hard Reality interrogates these binaries and attempts to loosen the hold of these categories in our encounters with matter and milieu.
Presenting a roster of artists who work across a variety of practices, media, and forms: from painting to sculpture, installation, moving image, and performance, the exhibition attends to the ways in which artists mediate this initial binary, working through the certainty of its polar distinction and proffering instead a more open-ended encounter with, on one hand, what may be considered 鈥渟oft fantasy鈥� and 鈥渉ard reality鈥� and, on the other, what may be found in between, alongside, or in the wake of unsettling these categories through the performative, the archival, or the mythological.
The titular typographic slant offers a framework to map out these mediations. On the one hand, it cleaves the two phrases, creating distinction between them. On the other, it stages the juxtaposition between them, coalescing the separate categories into a network of differential relations. Soft Fantasy / Hard Reality leans into this rhetorical slippage which leads us from the binary structure to these categories鈥� troubling, or else misrecognition. The exhibition itself flags the preciousness and precariousness of this juxtaposition and in its place offers ways in which the hardness of reality becomes fugitive trace or the softness of fantasy constitutes uncompromising matter. The exhibition, in this sense, is a study of these displacements鈥搊r how reality and fantasy become both soft and hard, concept and form.
Artists on show
Related articles
The capacious theme of this seven-artist show at Silverlens, New York, invites聽affinities outside of the basis of identity.
What's on nearby
