Carrousel

Friday, January 19 through Saturday, March 3, 2007

Guest curated by former Paragraph Artistic Director Hesse McGraw, now Assistant Director at Max Protetch Gallery in New York City, Carrousel features work by Kansas City based artists Marcus Cain, Leo Esquivel, Eric Grimes, Beniah Leuschke, Mike Sinclair, James Trotter, Egawa/Zbryk, and others.

“In the context of the 10th Anniversary of the Charlotte Street Foundation Awards, this show is an opportunity to recontextualize the work of past Charlotte Street Award winners, as well to propose additional artists who are perhaps overdue to receive the award,” writes McGraw.  “In organizing the show, I was keen to predominantly look at work by artists who I have not worked with in the past curatorially. The show is also an experiment in flexibility — as all the studio visits in preparation for the exhibition were conducted at the end of December — the artists were simply asked to show brand new work, older work never before seen, or to reconfigure past installations.”

A few cultural references serve as additional impetus for the show. Its title stems from the 1976 Sci-Fi film Logan’s Run. The film depicts a dystopian community that euthanizes is citizens at 30. “Carrousel” is the ritual in which participants are promised rebirth, but are actually killed in a human bug-zapper. A second reference is the prevalence of abandoned theme parks throughout the United States and particularly the abandoned Heritage USA park in South Carolina. This sprawling, gospel-oriented oasis was founded by Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and at one point was the third largest theme park in the United States. Now it sits in ruin.

Rather than serving as guidelines for the exhibition, these and other references triangulate a set of ideas contained in the artist’s work and the show as a whole. On the whole, the exhibit encompasses derailed fantasies, exploded dreams, and suspended celebrations. At one end of this spectrum is amusement, playfulness, ecstasy, salvation, and at the other lurks deception, dark underbellies, and death.