Margaret Lee info contact 179 Canal 47 Canal
Alisa Baremboym, Amy Yao, Andrei Koschmieder, Darren Bader, Debo Eilers, E’Wao Kagoshima, Tim Lokiec
9 December – 21 January
curated by Margaret Lee
Foot to Foot is exactly as it sounds, one foot against the other. I read an article about a famous young talent,
who offered up little personal information but did admit to spending more time then she deemed normal to
rubbing her feet together. Much to her chagrin, the reaction of her interviewer was that of total understanding
and simply replied, “Yes, it’s called self-soothing.”
In the last few days leading up to 2012 (and maybe that year rings no bells, but much has been said about the
Mayan calendar, dramatic shifts in consciousness, sun alignments with the Milky Way, energy stream
disruption and general end of the world fervor), not to mention the spread of global civic upheavals from the
Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, ominous economic predictions, currency collapse, natural disasters and
general all-in-all threats to the “comfortable” way of life (which by the way confirms many 2012 suspicions),
I’ve come around to thinking about this idea of self-soothing. With all this “blah, blah, blah” whirling around,
there is the temptation to retreat – solipsistic comfort is a real and often usual manifestation.
Foot to Foot is less about that, than…
Something closer to a “behavioral phenotype”. I read an article about a rare disease, offering glimpses of the
mechanics of the genetic code operating on thought and personality. Characterized by uncontrollable self-mutilation,
the genetic mutation present in those diagnosed consisted of just one misspelling in the code. In
interviewing two men who suffer from the debilitating disease, the interviewer found both men pleasant to be
around despite their penchant for hurling obscenities and punches in his direction.
The seven artists in this exhibition share very little and especially not an aesthetic sensibility. The works here
were chosen only because they move along the spectrum: cat, pickle, umbrella, room, thumbs up, unknown
till opening and woman.
