SOME KIND OF PRIMITIVE
SOME KIND OF PRIMITIVE
A solo exhibition by Antonio Serna
August 19–September 7, 2014
chashama 457 @125th
457 West 125th Street
New York, NY 10027
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday–Friday, 3–8pm
Saturday & Sunday, 12-5pm
Opening Reception:
Saturday, August 23rd, 3–5pm
August 1, 2014 - NEW YORK, NY - When time is stratified by progress we close the doors to the wondrous fluidity of time. The work presented in "Some Kind of Primitive", painting, sculpture, and found artifacts, cut through this imposed strata to excavate discontinuity and happenstance in the dissonant relationships between objects, places, and the histories that ground them.
Marking the beginning of this nonlinear narrative are the large paintings whose figuration oscillates between traditionally rendered figures and stenciled monolithic forms. Antiquated dinosaur illustrations are overlaid with silhouettes of nondescript pixelated buildings that reference early video game graphics. It is this nuanced and slightly ambiguous time-shift that we will keep coming back to in this exhibition.
These dioramic paintings set the stage for the other free associative elements in the space including a twenty-foot long spear the artist found in Brooklyn. This modern-primitive tool doesn’t necessarily ignore its precedents—Duchamp’s Urinal and Nauman’s Slant Step—instead it resists appropriation by incessantly reminding us of the ambiguous connection between survival and violence throughout time.
Elsewhere replicas of the spear appear again, are they cheap souvenirs to this roadside attraction or are they meant to encourage the DIY sub/urban preparedness? With even less clues, the exhibition continues to dislodge us from a fixed judgment of time. For example other renderings depict unknown subjects and places without revealing their time. And so whether they are from the Anthropocene or the Jurassic period, we can’t really tell. In the end we are left to contemplate the context of these modern archeological findings and question the logic of progressive associations written into our past and future history.
Artist Biography:
Antonio Serna is an artist living and working in New York. With art as a tool, he is constantly comparing and contrasting the human construct of progress with the animal instinct of survival. The results of which have been exhibited in New York, Spain, Mexico, Amsterdam, and Texas.
Outside of his studio, Antonio Serna enjoys exploring the social and political context of art and visual culture via collaborative projects such as vizKult.org and in Arts & Labor’s Alternative Economies Working Group. Through his research he has recently developed artCommons, a local art-sharing project, notes for this project can be found on www.artandthecommons.org
Originally from Texas, Antonio has participated and organized projects in New York, Texas, Las Vegas, Spain, Mexico, Berlin, and Romania. Antonio has also taught and lectured at Parsons School of Design, St. Johns University, and at Brooklyn College as a teaching fellow. Antonio Serna holds a Masters in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College, and a BFA from Parsons School of Art.
