Nick Gentry
SCOPE MIAMI November 29th December 4th 2011 SCOPE Pavilion
Wynwood Arts District NE 1st Ave @ NE 30th St Miami, FL 33127
Featured Artists: Troy Abbott, Damien Hirst, Tina La Porta, C. Finley, Beejoir, Nick Gentry, Penny, Mantis, Stella Mouzi, Simon Thompson, Scott Snyder, Oleg Dou, Oliver Malin, Philip Ross Munro and Nan Goldin.
Apart from the literal implications of the show’s title, ‘Sex, Drugs & Profanity’ will explore the varying modalities of social norms and, simultaneously, taboos with which contemporary artists consistently wrestle with. Cultural references to drug use are rife with contradictions; whether a single pill, injection or drop can hurt or heal is a source of consistent, passionate debate amongst artists, politicians and scientists, alike.
Artists such as Nan Goldin, Tina La Porta, Scott Snyder and Oleg Dou do display active and inactive references to drugs and medications, but there is a deeper concern for gauging the interactive; to trigger the limitations of the viewer’s imagination beyond their immediate associations with the image, itself. More than what a mass-manufactured drug can or can’t do, the artists grapple with the after-effects, the body remaining and the mind permanently altered. Sex and profanity are, often erroneously, inextricably linked as and in a single condition. Stereotyping sexual behaviors and underlying fetishisms within urban culture has produced a widely-regarded notion of the activity within the ‘underground’, a vampire-like complex which effectively masks any sense of normalcy of sex as a natural act.
Thus, drawing on ancient oral and written traditions, particularly within Western cultures, the profane is equated to dark, the sacred with light. Artists such as Nick Gentry, Troy Abbott, Simon Thompson and Stella Mouzi visually rebel against these common distinctions, instead offering the possibility of the sacred pushed deep underground and the profane distributed in broad daylight, achieving the spiritual and sensory blasphemies it seeks to suppress.
Oliver Malin
Penny
