黑料不打烊

When I Am Empty is a group exhibition featuring the work of seven artists 鈥� Ayanna Dozier, Ilana Harris-Babou, Meena Hasan, Lucia Hierro, Catherine Opie, Chuck Ramirez, and Pacifico Silano 鈥� who explore the dominant myths of the American dream that govern and shape our personal narratives.  

These artists use advertising鈥檚 strategies toward generating want and desire, and through photography, video, and collage, use it as a viable tool for new meaning making in contemporary art. The title of the exhibition comes from a prompt from the manufacturer on a Whatacup beverage container. Enlarged by the photographer Chuck Ramirez to bodily proportions, the empty cup and phrase in this particular moment takes on a new interpretation, drawing attention to the spent, drained, state of Americans physically and mentally. The phrase also points to the inherent disposability of  cheap, mass-produced goods and the larger structures and systems that belie economic mobility and how people are valued in our society. The works in this exhibition reveal that while the desire manufactured in advertising is pervasive and false, there is a desire and need for untangling and reimagining America's obsession with the dream of upward mobility and economic freedom. 

Keys to this reimagining of our shared American dream is the artwork鈥檚 ability to show the intertwined nature of desire and sadness as well as the emotive potential of the personal, a seduction of the real lived experience. The artists鈥� coyly use this seduction with some of the more complex and complicated ideals of economic and political freedom in the United States. Like a bad relationship allowing for these ideas to live in one vessel allows for a highly desirous courtship that will most likely end in a deep well of sadness.