Skit

Nicholas Buffon Jashin Friedrich Eugene Kotlyarenko Anne Kunsemiller Sean Landers Jared Madere Laurel Nakadate Mary Reid Kelley David Roesing Dakotah Savage Will Stewart Ezra Tessler The Hole is proud to present a group show curated by artist and curator Tisch Abelow. In a show with a few familiar names, but many totally new to our audience, Abelow pulls from her community of emerging artists to elaborate on a sensibility she has encountered with young art-making. The work involves a problematized sense of humor and examines the relationship between irony and sincerity. The artists create provisional worlds, often in a performative way, to look at intentionality, making the viewer question "do they mean it?" and the answer being an unexpected "yes." The artists in Skit embrace a freedom and playfulness of self-depiction in many forms. This show explores the sentiment of coming-of-age in a sophisticated, self-conscious, and teasing way. Extravagant and sentimental, these artists incorporate elements of camp, D.I.Y., and kitsch, engaging with something illogical and whimsical. Much like AH HOLE AH HOLE, a blog I co-run with Dakotah Savage, the work in this show is multi-layered, associative, and often self-contradictory. This antithetical mentality often leads to the creation of self-reflective environments. Ezra Tessler’s anthropomorphic figures, Nicholas Buffon’s miniatures, Savage’s puppet sets, Will Stewart’s domestic interiors - each artist explores the performative as a way to create provisional and experimental worlds. These artists are explicitly flexible. They morph in and out of media as well as different aspects of their personalities, often using self-sabotage to their advantage. They embrace the playful and the abject as one; they play underdog to their own alpha wolf. In her video and photographic works, Laurel Nakadate positions herself in precarious situations to transform and reinvent herself. There is a similar investigation of power in Eugene Kotlyarenko’s lonely and self-deprecating video narratives; an inherent self-discovery, for one and all, in this voyeurism. -Tisch Abelow