Press Release from Chicago
The press release from the 23rd atmosphere group gallery:
UNEARTHING THE NARRATIVE IN ART TODAY
March 11 thru April 22, 2011
Our March-April, 2011 Show at The 23rd Atmosphere Group Gallery thrusts to the forefront the question: What place does storytelling have in the world of contemporary art? As other media developed—books, photography, movies, TV, the Internet–societies no longer needed to rely on the visual arts to tell their stories, to carry forward their cultural and historical contexts. The visual arts risked becoming extraneous and had to reinvent themselves, slowly and surely, into and through abstraction. But, particularly with minimalism, the visual arts removed themselves so far from any nexus with general human experience that they paradoxically risked the very thing they sought to avoid—becoming extraneous to the world at large. Postmodernism, in this sense, can be viewed as a series of multifaceted attempts by artists to revitalize the visual arts with some measure of their own human experiences. The resuscitation of storytelling is just one example of that effort and it’s beautifully brought to live by the artists participating in our Show.
Returning to us from prior shows are Mathew Hall from Salt Lake City and Mel Smothers from Brooklyn, NY. Joining them are Chicago artists Scott Multer and Robert Furman.