This exhibition features 20 international contemporary artists, including; David Altmejd, Michaël Borremans, Folkert de Jong, Karl Haendel, Jenny Holzer, James Hopkins, Ann Lislegaard, Roxy Paine, Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, Erick Swenson and Alison Elizabeth Taylor. A Brighter Day focuses on contemporary themes of alienation, paranoia, political outrage, deviant behavior, cyberspace, global politics and the ultimate drug; consumerism. These dystopic visions are explored in a variety of media.
The ominous tenor of these times has embedded itself in the psyche of artists today. They are peeling back the veneer and delving into this collective anxiety. The challenge is to find individual voices amidst the maelstrom and glut of images with which we are bombarded.
Folkert de Jong's life-size Styrofoam sculptures embody the fragile boundary between security and chaos; Roxy Paine's entropic musings look to nature as a metaphor for conflict and resolution; David Altmejd sculptures fracture reality with mirrored surfaces and scattered body parts in hopes of finding transformation; Michaël Borreman's mute paintings depict an austere and oppressive world; Ann Lislegaard's videos are existential ruminations on displacement; Karl Haendel's obsessive drawings use appropriation to examine our collective histories; and Oliver Payne and Nick Relph point their fingers at contemporary consumer culture with bad-boy humor and searing wit. Whether it is with irony, humor or earnestness, the works in A Brighter Day are mediations on our uneasy relationship with the world in its present state.