Trout Fishing in America
Richard Brautigan鈥檚 first and highly abstract novel, Trout Fishing In America, eschews any real continuity between its disparate chapters, but characters and objects reappear throughout different stories and settings. The titular phrase of 鈥渢rout fishing in America鈥� reoccurs as the name of a character, a hotel, an ambiguous residue, and the actual activity of fishing. Trout Fishing in America, the exhibition, takes a similar approach to a curated group show. It features a diverse group of artists: painters, poets, performers, computer game programmers, sculptors, and writers, some working outside their assigned mediums or taxonomies. Which one best fits the mold of an artist? This question is as fraught as which of Brautigan鈥檚 esoteric referents is the 鈥渢rue鈥� trout fishing in America. Objects and ideas reoccur throughout the exhibition, but they reject the thematic couplings and narrative of most group shows. If there is a goal to this exhibition, it is to break down the barriers of nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adverbs society gives us to mark the boxes of, yes, 鈥渢his鈥� is art and yes, this is what 鈥渢his鈥� looks like. The work in this exhibition does not wish to clarify a position, but to slowly tease out a position through various, dissonant artistic voices. It is not unlike casting out onto the river and catching one fish and several twigs, and being content with those results.
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Richard Brautigan鈥檚 first and highly abstract novel, Trout Fishing In America, eschews any real continuity between its disparate chapters, but characters and objects reappear throughout different stories and settings. The titular phrase of 鈥渢rout fishing in America鈥� reoccurs as the name of a character, a hotel, an ambiguous residue, and the actual activity of fishing. Trout Fishing in America, the exhibition, takes a similar approach to a curated group show. It features a diverse group of artists: painters, poets, performers, computer game programmers, sculptors, and writers, some working outside their assigned mediums or taxonomies. Which one best fits the mold of an artist? This question is as fraught as which of Brautigan鈥檚 esoteric referents is the 鈥渢rue鈥� trout fishing in America. Objects and ideas reoccur throughout the exhibition, but they reject the thematic couplings and narrative of most group shows. If there is a goal to this exhibition, it is to break down the barriers of nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adverbs society gives us to mark the boxes of, yes, 鈥渢his鈥� is art and yes, this is what 鈥渢his鈥� looks like. The work in this exhibition does not wish to clarify a position, but to slowly tease out a position through various, dissonant artistic voices. It is not unlike casting out onto the river and catching one fish and several twigs, and being content with those results.
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