Irrational Exuberance

Tate Foley, Oil, Colored pencil on paper, 2011

Presented by Recession Art, Curated by Bradley Bailey

April 30 – May 8, 2011 At The Invisible Dog

CLICK HERE FOR A GALLERY OF IMAGES FROM THE SHOW

“Don’t stop believin’; hold onto that feelin’.” – Journey

Irrational Exuberance deals with seemingly rational systems of mass belief or delusion, and their relationship to values, whether economic or moral. The show is curated by Bradley Bailey and features work by Paloma Crousillat, Tate Foley, Nikita Gale, Danny Ghitis, James Gillispie, Ani Katz, Sam Keller, Ely Kim, Conrad Kofron, The Ladies’ Auxiliary, Alma Leiva, Azusa Murakami, David Needleman, Johanna Povirk-Znoy, Jay Peter Salvas, Holly Streekstra, Gabriela Vainsencher, and Anusha Venkataraman.

Events Included:

April 29, 7-9 pm: VIP Reception

Collectors, Patrons, and special guests join the artists for champagne and cupcakes as we complete our installation. Email info@recessionartshows.com to find out how you can become a VIP.

April 30, 6 pm to Midnight: OPENING

May 4, 7:30-9 pm: Hot Movie Night 3

Recession Art hosts a crew of up and coming filmmakers, curated by Jesse Wakeman. Visit our Film page to learn more about the filmmakers and their work.

About the Curator:

Bradley Bailey is an art historian who studies the late-nineteenth century “opening” of Japan, with special emphasis on the development of the international art market. Originally from Kansas City, he is currently a PhD candidate in the History of Art at Yale University, where he also earned his BA, MA and MPhil. In 2010, he received his MBA from the Yale School of Management, where he has given annual lectures about the economics of contemporary art. He has written for the MFA catalogues of the Yale School of Art and about Hokusai for the Yale Art Gallery Bulletin. In the past, he has worked in development at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Most recently, he presented his research on James McNeill Whistler’s collection of Japanese prints at the international “Orientalism/Occidentalism” conference, held at the Russian Institute for Cultural Research in Moscow. Though an unabashed WASP, he does not like gin.

About the Artists:

Paloma Crousillat

Paloma Crousillat was born in Lima, Peru, and moved with her family in 1986 to the Washington DC area. She received her BA in Fine Arts at the Slade School of Art in London and moved to New York to complete her MFA at the School of Visual Arts. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn. The telescope series of drawings examines the formal potential of systems and structures in the creative process. Telescopes are presented as symbols of contrasting themes and ideologies: religion and spirituality against science and politics.
(palomacrousillat.com)

Tate Foley

Tate Foley was born in Millerton, a small, rural town in Northcentral Pennsylvania. He received his BA in Studio Art in 2007 from Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and his MFA in Printmaking in 2010 from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Foley creates works that pervert relationships between images and text to raise new questions about ideas. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art/Visiting Artist at the Leigh Gerdine College of Fine Arts at Webster University in Saint Louis.
(tatemillerton.com)

Nikita Gale

Nikita Gale is a self-taught conceptual artist and photographer based in Atlanta, Georgia. She has a BA in Anthropology from Yale University. Her recent work addresses the world where advertising and digital technology dictate the transmission of ideas and morals. She finds inspiration in exploring the absurdity of the commonplace, with work that is often an attempt to return literal meaning to the concepts that have been grossly abstracted in advertising, especially those forms of advertising that incite desire within the consumer by means of delusion and demoralization.
(nikitagale.com)

Danny Ghitis

Brooklyn-based photographer Danny Ghitis was born in Colombia and emigrated to the US at a young age. He studied at the University of Florida and worked for Florida newspapers before going freelance in 2008. His series Best Day Ever! addresses the areas surrounding New York City, where a melting pot of customs collides with unstoppable consumerism expressed through a unique wedding culture. A sense of longing for the decadence of the city is revealed, but contrasts strongly with the weddings’ suburban context. And despite a cornucopia of religions and cultures, most weddings he photographs are practically indistinguishable from one another.
(dannyghitis.com)

James Gillispie

James Gillispie is originally from Houston, Texas, and received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004, an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2006. His paintings on linen and canvas play with color and geometry through abstracted forms arranged in systematic structures. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
(jamesgillispie.com)

Ani Katz

Ani Katz received a BFA from Yale University in 2008. While a student, she was a photographer for the Yale Daily News, and has since toured as a rock band photographer. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, and is the Art Director for Recession Art. She would be happy to photograph your upcoming event, as long as you don’t mind that the pictures will look nothing like what you remember.
(anikatz.com)

Sam Keller

Sam Keller was born in New York City, and received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. In 2010, he co-founded R.K. Projects, a Providence, Rhode Island-based pop-up gallery. In Irrational Exuberance, he will exhibit a portion of Rainbow Flush, an edition of 275 replacement toilet flush levers given a “rainbow” finish in a process called physical vapor deposition. When installed, this functional work is meant to solicit a greater connection to the banal. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.
(flickr.com/photos/shkeller)

Ely Kim

Ely Kim is an Art Director, dancer, and healer based in Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Yale in 2010 and considers his greatest influences to be his time spent growing up in Las Vegas, puppies, and crystals. He enjoys smiling, making things, and, most of all, sending out the positive vibes. The series of posters in Irrational Exuberance uses humorous exclamations, questions, and statements to lead to a deeper reflection on contemporary consumer society.
(welikehim.com)

Conrad Kofron

Conrad Kofron was born in Port Alto, Texas, and earned a BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in 2005. As a dispassionate observer, he references technology, ethnocentrism, cultural/subcultural archetypes, consumerism, gender, religious programs, socio-digital detritus, nostalgia, and youth within his two-dimensional works. His art incorporates painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
(conradkofron.com)

The Ladies’ Auxiliary

Founded in 2007, The Ladies’ Auxiliary is a maternal organization dedicated to the promotion and preservation of the homely aesthetic. Their membership is comprised of married women professionally trained in the functionless arts. Their non-political, self-serving organization selects projects based upon their potential futility. Their work references household tableaux and daytime television, as they employ the skills acquired in art school to improve their families’ lives. Their video pieces demonstrate their irrational exuberance for consumerism.
(ladiesaux.com)

Alma Leiva

Alma Leiva was born in Honduras and moved to the United States when she was fourteen years old. In 2007, she received a BFA in Electronic Media and Photography from New World School of The Arts in Miami, Florida. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Photography and Film at Virginia Commonwealth University. In her latest work, Celdas (Prison Cells), she builds sets in her studio which she then photographs. Using the absurdity of bringing outdoor activities inside imaginary Central American spaces, she addresses the problem of violence in Central America and the voluntary reclusion to which citizens have subjected themselves for their own safety.
(almaleiva.com)

Azusa Murakami

Azusa Murakami was born in Japan, and studied architecture at the Bartlett at University College London and earned an MA in Design Products from the Royal College of Art. She now works and lives in London. She constructs her works around a narrative formed by a family of objects. Through crafts, she explores architecture on an intimate scale, bringing meticulous detail to the construction of her work. In Irrational Exuberance, she is exhibiting a table set from a fictional fast food restaurant designed to slow down the experience, and a ghost bikini, reminding viewers that the swimsuit was named after an atomic bomb testing site.
(azusamurakami.com)

David Needleman

Born and raised in New York, David Needleman is a portrait photographer, commercially concentrating on celebrity as his subject matter. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts in 2000, he spent the first eight years of his career working for and being mentored by Steven Meisel. Since venturing out on his own, he has independently photographed for clients including; Luomo Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, Time, Playboy, and Abercrombie & Fitch. His work is a reflection of the current state of our society, but carrying an underlying forceful charge or message that everything will work out in the end.
(davidneedleman.com)

Johanna Povirk-Znoy

Johanna Povirk-Znoy lives in Brooklyn, where she makes sculptures and drawings and writes short stories. She uses the cheap and easily over-looked as a starting point for her drawings and sculptures. For Irrational Exuberance, she will create a series of wall sculptures similar in size to traditional portraits. Each sculpture will be made of approximately $15 worth of goods from a specific Sunset Park dollar store and will aspire to tease the rich and desirable out of the mundane and plastic.

Jay Peter Salvas

Jay Peter Salvas holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. He resides in the South Bronx and is a visiting design critic at RISD. His work responds to how the world around us has become a frenzied kaleidoscope of images, sounds, commands, instructions, sales pitches, and promotions, a relentless realm of elevated energy in an array of hyperactive psychedelic color, shapes, and languages. Far from finding this hyperactivity too much, he exploits it in his work. Through GIF-T.TV, he creates the internet’s digital equivalent of a carnival madhouse, where the notion of communication is twisted and squeezed like a wet dishrag.
(GIF-T.TV)

Holly Streekstra

Holly Streekstra received her MFA from Louisiana State University. In 2008, she was a Jerome Foundation Fellow at Franconia Sculpture Park. Her work is concerned with ideas of time, technology, cultural myths, and illusion, and has been exhibited at Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul; Woman Made Gallery, Chicago; and Baton Rouge Center for Contemporary Art. Her peepshow style automaton offers a play on the popular notion of “Sawing a Woman in Half.” Viewers look through a peephole into an interior view that gives a distorted perspective of a miniature saw and a US dollar. Turning the crank saws the dollar in half.
(hollystreekstra.net)

Gabriela Vainsencher

Gabriela Vainsencher was born in Buenos Aires and raised in Tel Aviv. In 2005, she moved to Brooklyn, where she currently lives and works. Her drawings, videos, and installations have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in the US and abroad, including Mass MoCA, La Chambre Blanche in Quebec City, the Freies Museum in Berlin, and Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn. In 2008, she began her ongoing project Morning Drawing, for which she makes a drawing every morning and posts an image of it on her website. She is currently working on a trilogy of fictional video animations concerning the inner life of a stadium light.
(gabrielavainsencher.com)

Anusha Venkataraman

Anusha Venkataraman is an urban planner, writer, artist, and activist. She currently works at El Puente in Brooklyn as the Arts & Education Manager of the Green Light District, a neighborhood-wide sustainability initiative in the Southside of Williamsburg. She has also worked with numerous community groups in organizing efforts, and as a visual/conceptual artist both independently and with collectives. Landline/Lifeline presents excerpts from interviews of people from Detroit utilizing an interactive landline telephone. The inviduals on the other end of the line share their ideas on hope, transformation, and the alternative economic, social, and educational systems that they are creating in Detroit.