The Dikeou Collection is pleased to announce COMPLICIT OBJECTS: ART IN THE AGE OF AUTHENTICITY, a one night sculpture exhibition featuring work by Metropolitan State College of Denver Fine Arts students opens May 25th 7-9pm at the California St exhibition space. Curated by artist and professor Derrick Velasquez.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Now more than ever contemporary artists are aware of the art historical provenance of their own work. Makers wade through the seemingly unlimited sea of materials and concepts to understand the idea of how artistic lineage is created: by reacting to what came before, and, therefore acknowledging the complicated layers that come with working in a spatial mode. Sculpture’s generosity (how does an artist deal with “all this stuff” in the physical and post-physical world?) and an age of proliferated information has led artists to use authenticity as a lens through which to intelligently question culture, art/history and their own art objects (as one artist put it “lately Stephen Hawking and Bruce Sterling relate to my work better than art historical texts”). When artists become complicit in subverting the game of authorship, innovation, and genuineness of concept and material, it lightens the often times weighty burden of having to present a royal lineage of art historical references. At this point we can hope to dig deeper and confront the work beyond the heady surface of history and contemplate how making contemporary art is “so easy, yet so hard”. In this sense, authenticity itself is not fundamentally arbitrary and constantly questioned, but instead embraced.
-Derrick Velasquez
FEATURED ARTISTS:
CORY BROWN
JENNIFER BURDESS
JASON CLARK
LARA NICKEL
DANIEL NILSSON
RORY SMITH
DAVID SOHL
|SHAWN TAYLOR
OLIVER LEE TERRY
AIDEN TUNNELL
PATRICE RENEE WASHINGTON