Fort Gansevoort Gallery will open its online window, announcing SEEING THROUGH YOU, a series of weekly online exhibitions organized for the gallery by invited curators and scholars. Launching with its first exhibition on Thursday, March 26, 2020, this initiative will highlight artists from around the globe and aim to initiate lively discourse among larger and more diverse audiences for whom the web and social media are an even more vital ‘salon space’ in a time of crisis.
The series takes its title from a 2004 piece by Barbara Kruger, who has said, “I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be, and what we become.” In a moment when communities worldwide are called upon to redefine daily life, seek new ways to connect, and locate sources of mutual support, art has a critical role to play.
The first exhibition of SEEING THROUGH YOU is named for the 2016 Pet Shop Boys song, A cloud in a box. Organized by Los Angeles-based writer, educator, and independent curator Terry R. Myers, the show brings together seven artists currently working in Berlin, LA, Santiago, Stockholm, and Tel Aviv, and reinforces how profoundly these artists have, in Myers’ words “unexpected connections, as they been together for quite some time in my mind’s eye.”
Artists in A cloud in a box are Milly Barzellai, Chinatsu Ikeda, Peter Köhler, Vicente Matte, Jeni Spota C., Keith Tolch, and Pilar Trujillo.
Myers explains: “Collectively, the works here display an abundance of imagery in a vibrant and material spectrum that contains agile bands of alienation, contentment, devotion, infatuation, joy, tragedy, and magic. These bands, of course, are powerful and they bend and/or blend within the work of any one of these artists as much as they do across that of the group. Magic is last in this list because it mixes with the others the best. Magic is a secret, but a secret made to be shown to others. The Pet Shop Boys song tells the story of a magician with a cloud in a box— ‘a secret between him and the sky’— that he would display once a week. These seven artists, each in their own way, are doing the very same thing.”
A cloud in a box will be on view online at fortgansevoort.com from March 26 through Spring, 2020.