Martin Basher : Free Spirit No Interest
March 10 - April 4 2009
Starkwhite is pleased to present Free Spirit No
Interest, a solo show by New York-based artist Martin Basher,
from 10 March to 4 April 2009. See
www.starkwhite.co.nz/ARTISTS/Martin Basher for installation
shots.
"
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina; old
furniture, grandparents pots and pans / the used things, warm with
generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape.
Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A
featherweight portable museum."
- Susan Sontag.
Located at the intersection of rampant big-box consumerism on
one axis, and an age old search for personal meaning and belief on
another, the work of Martin Basher examines ways in which images
and objects connoting hope, utopic desire, freedom, and the ache to
believe are articulated, co-opted and consumed in our
commodity-saturated capitalist culture.
Weighing corporate profit and mass production against what might
be best described as a peculiarly modern desire to find enduring
personal profundity through objects, Basher's work is an
inconclusive chronicle of hopes and disappointments of life in
late-capitalism; namely the affection, disaffection and miasma of
life when the dollar is the bottom line and desire and meaning are
deftly manipulated and manufactured for commercial gain.
Free Spirit / No Interest, features a suite of new
paintings, drawings and sculptures constructed primarily from
material found in clearance warehouses, junkyards, head shops and
dollar stores. Plastic, artificial and cheap, Basher cobbles
together this material in a kind of sculptural collage that plays
with these paradoxes of mass-consumed culture, exposing longings,
desires and loathings normally cloaked in the banality of familiar.
The lottery tickets, sex toys, booze, crystals, incense, nudist
magazines, junk food and vitamins etc are emblematic of utopic,
sublime, ineffable experience, yet they are anchored by commerce,
and informed by a visual vernacular/culture where commerce,
spirituality and religiosity are deeply and inexorably entwined,
symbiotic even. Basher dissects and recontextualizes these
relationships, and in doing so upsets the normal order, playing
them off against each other. As neither quite believer or
disbeliever, Basher takes a critical look at the complex plays of
consumed desire, while as a participant, he is as invested and as
implicated as anyone else.
Basher is among a rising generation of young artists working
internationally who are grappling to deal with the contradictory
dynamics of power, desire and identity within a consumer-capitalist
world. Bracketed by the utopic rhetoric of modernism one hand and
an amnesiac depoliticized post-modern swamp of MTV, reality
television and dollar-store merchandise on the other, the works in
this show see genuine experiences of happiness and satisfaction in
contradictory, overlapping relationships with artificial
structures of happiness and satisfaction. As a deeply
ambivalent observer, Basher's work exposes these tensions, and at
the same time remains complicit, a shrine and a funerary pyre to
capitalism in equal measure.
The artist wishes to acknowledge the generous support of
Creative New Zealand toward the production of this
exhibition.
Martin Basher holds a MFA from the prestigious Fine Art Division
of Columbia University in New York City, where he has been based
for a decade. He was recently the inaugural recipient of the Susan
Goodman Residency and Fellowship in Berlin, Germany, and will take
up a residency at the Artists Alliance in Downtown New York in the
second half of 2009. He has exhibited internationally and
nationally.
Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road,
Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows,
independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new
music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite also
represents artists from New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific
rim.
Please contact the gallery for further information on the
exhibition and photographs.
Starkwhite
510 Karangahape Road, Auckland, New Zealand
Tel. +64 9 3070703
Monday to Friday: 11.00am to 6.00pm
Saturday: 11.00am to 5.00pm
starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz
www.starkwhite.co.nz
