Innocence

Morgan Herrin, Greg Ito, Bernard Martin, Paul McMahon, Ana Milenkovic, Emma Stern

Curated by Andrew Woolbright

July 31-September 3, 2018

Opening August 3

Rotation 1

Press Release

An innocent little lamb poses questions to a snowglobe, to better understand the institutional powers within our egalitarian utopia... 

Lamb: What does monopsony mean? 

A dog starvd at his Master’s Gate Predicts the ruin of the State

Lamb: If return on investment exceeds rate of growth, doesn’t that mean our system doesn’t just create inequality, but necessitates it? 

The Strongest Poison ever known Came from Caesars Laurel Crown

 Lamb: It sounds like that when markets are successful, they encourage an “irrational exuberance” that inherently cause asset value to arbitrarily spike, making crashes inevitable. So the more successful it is, the more alienated from reality it becomes?

The Whore & Gambler by the State Licencd build that Nations Fate

Lamb: Would you define nature as an external cost or benefit to the market? What about healthcare? 

Every Wolfs and Lions howl Raises from Hell a Human Soul

Each outcry of the hunted hare A fibre from the Brain does tear

Super Dutchess presents Innocence, an exploration of William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence” that intends to examine a borderless, nonhierarchical ecology through a two-part exhibition curated into works of dark and light.  Blake utilized innocence as a subversive political engine for timely, cultural re-evaluation. With “To see a World in a Grain of Sand,” Blake was able to set up a series of statements bordering on vajrayana that can simultaneously entertain the micro and the macro. Interiority and accident are conflated with cosmic scales, examined fresh without presupposed judgment.

Rotation 1 (Light)

Carved out of wood is a woman with hooved feet resting her elbow on an axe. She is sitting on a pedestal that still has the caps of mushrooms growing on its side. Her feet rest on a human skull and it is unclear whether she is protecting it or displaying it like a trophy for us. She is a confused ecology, an indecipherable blend of human and nature, who’s loyalty to humankind seems ambiguous. Morgan Herrin’s Boudica is an apocryphal imagining of an almost recognizable lore. 

Behind her is a painting of a textureless body, downloaded from the internet, executed in traditional technique by Emma Stern. The content of horny coders, she is an open source body without skeleton that is infantilized and overly sexual. Stern breathes life and charm into this fleshless girl; she indulgently rests on the bed, confrontational and refusing to disappear. 

To the right, Greg Ito has painted a scene through a locked window of a sailboat heading towards the smoke stacks of a distant shore. 

In the top of the space, Blake-like Gnosticism by the Woodstock troubadour Paul McMahon hangs. A small diptych of an angel and a demon, inverted and flipped but still side by side. It is impossible to miss their similarity.

Rotation 2

Paul McMahon’s piece still remains high above in the space. A blown up facsimile of a pulp comic book page hangs on the back wall. It is a painting by Bernard Martin, startling in its illusion. Allegorical and didactic, it is a moment of philosophy in an unusual format. Within this simple, narrative format, we learn to understand the circle of life and death in a comic book almost impossible to imagine. 

To its left is a small painting by Ana Milenkovic, an image of Poseidon considering a piece of coral. The god considers its creation, perhaps taken aback by its beauty and forgetting his hand in making it. To the right is a painting of a locked window, a candle sitting on its ledge. Within Greg Ito’s scene, now a nocturne, it is impossible to tell if the rising smoke is from the candle inside or from the ominous, industrial island across the sea.