Gyan Shrosbree

Show at FLIGHT Gallery: "The Suspects"

0762010

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What : Art Opening - Unveiling of a book and series of paintings "The Suspects" by recent San Antonio transplant Gyan Shrosbree.
Where : FL!GHT GALLERY, 1906 South Flores, San Antonio, TX 78204
When : Second Saturday July 10, 2010 7-10 pm
Who : Gyan Shrosbree + book interpretation by DeviBooks

What the artist has to say :

I was a little bit hopeful going in. We’d e-mailed and he seemed all right, not great, but probably not an axe murderer. When we met he was sitting at the bar, so I couldn't see the lower half of his body. He wore a low-necked (tee? No collar?) shirt with a leather (silver, gold) necklace supporting a large wooden cross. He chose to not stand up when I arrived; I chose to overlook it. During our conversation, he told me all about himself, and his work, and his problems, and his charming idiosyncracies, which some might call quirks, or flaws, possibly even red flags, or a cry for help. He made time slow down to a glacial pace, and when we finally stood up, his voice had not only invaded my brain, but was triggering the gag reflex deep in my throat. Notwithstanding, nothing could have prepared me for the real shocker of the night. Poking out the bottom of the widest stove pipe jeans to be seen this side of the new millennium were the pleatherest black puffy-soled loafers to ever disgrace a dance floor. I suppose the puffy soles made him feel taller. The cracked and dirty pleather spoke volumes, beginning with: I really fucking stink! They were cheap and old and all I could think of was sleazy, puffy, pointy-toed man sleazing down the street in run down sleaze loafers. Finally, he showed me he was an open-minded, modern man by letting me pick up the tab for my glass of wine and his six scotch and sodas. I’ve tried and failed to erase every detail of him from my memory.

Image attached "I'm a real respecter of women," from "The Suspects"

For More info contact : Justin Parr @ FL!GHT - 210.872.2586 or umlemo@gmail.com

The Suspects book published by DEVIBOOK

0762010

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This is a book of Gyan's upcoming show, The Suspects, on Saturday July 10th at Flight Gallery in San Antonio. We will have them for sale at the opening, or if you are from out of town you can order them from lulu

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-suspects/11709513

Show at Unit B!

05242010

Gyan |

This is All Real

UNIT B, SAN ANTONIO

- Kate Green -

Joey Fauerso, Leslee Fraser, Gyan Shrosbree, This is All Real, 2010; mixed media; dimensions variable; courtesy Unit B, San Antonio; photo by Chris Castillo

Joey Fauerso, Leslee Fraser, Gyan Shrosbree, This is All Real, 2010; installation view, Unit B, San Antonio; courtesy Unit B, San Antonio; photo by Chris Castillo

For his 1917 work Fountain, Marcel Duchamp purchased a urinal, turned it on its side, signed it with the pseudonym R. Mutt, and then submitted it to the “unjuried” Society of Independent Artists exhibition, which rejected the work as “not art.” With this gesture, Duchamp upset the hitherto relatively stable basis for knowing an art object upon sight. In recent years many artists have updated Duchamp’s proposal that an artwork’s validity and value comes from its context by incorporating curating into their practice or presenting their work within a collection. In 2009 Vik Muniz made a memorable and amusing mark in this category by juxtaposing design objects from the Museum of Modern Art’s collection with works by art-world darlings—a wooden pencil with eraser by Hymen Lipman (1858) was paired with John Baldessari’s I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971), for example. At present Maurizio Cattelan, who has made a career of critiquing traditional notions of art and artmaking, has a project at the Menil Collection that upends the expectation that a solo show should provide a concentrated look at an artist’s oeuvre; instead, his works are sited throughout the institution, interspersed amongst its displays.

Cattelan and Muniz are just two of the many artists who have lately generated Duchampian conversations about what constitutes an art object and an artist’s work. At the artist-run gallery Unit B in San Antonio, Joey Fauerso, Leslee Fraser and Gyan Shrosbree, a trio of longtime friends and artists, are also contributing to the dialogue with their energetic and endearing collaborative project This is All Real. The exhibition is a colorful and crazy mash-up of plants, figurines and other personal knickknacks; recent drawings, watercolors, sculptures and a video by the artists; and a couple of mixed-media works jointly made for the show. Hung salon-style and without labels, the exhibition is so crowded with delights and the occasional knockout that I resisted the urge to sort out who made every last element and embraced the idea that anything can become artful within the right context.

While I was content not to know whether a pair of unusual bookends was made by one of the artists, a readymade or just brought from home, I did appreciate finding out that Fauerso, who is known for contemplative watercolors and animations that isolate figures in discordant environments, contributed one of the most engaging works in the show. In her poignant, disturbing and funny video Me Time, she makes out with hand puppets with such passion that the fabric creatures seem to come alive. By contrast Fraser’s arrangements of Americana generate some of the quieter and more enigmatic moments in the exhibition. In Civilization #2 a TV table is dotted with a walnut, a lacquered clamshell and a heart-painted holder filled with pink cocktail napkins that read, “Close the curtains.” The kitschy display creates a charged domestic puzzle. Shrosbree, for her part, brings exuberance to the show. In one grouping of her works, This Is Not My Life, an entire wall is covered with giant, fantastical figures of friendly bats, fancy ladies and faux curtains. Every element is cut out of canvas but painted so expressively that you might contemplate trying to join the fairytale world.

The exhibition’s show-stopper is the artists’ collaborative installation This is All Real, which takes over the second of Unit B’s two small rooms. Here stand life-sized photographic cutouts of the three friends, each captured smiling and animated: Shrosbree leans back enjoying the show, Fraser is caught mid dance move and Fauerso happily plays a cardboard flute while actual music is piped in and a real instrument case collects donations. Like the show as a whole, the work cleverly suspends the divide between art and life. With Duchamp as a touchstone, This is All Real delves into one of postmodernity’s paradoxes: that while many of us intellectually embrace the idea that life can be art and vice versa, we have difficulty with the notion that all of it has similar value and is indeed real.

Kate Green is a freelance writer and is pursuing her PhD in art history at the University of Texas at Austin.

This exhibition runs through July 2, 2010.