the nervous peal

01 April 2012

PRESS: The Displaced Person - ARTFORUM

The Displaced Person - ARTFORUM review

“The Displaced Person” INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
14A Orchard Street
January 6–February 12

Walt Cassidy -The Monarch's Cage, 2011.

Alienation, it would seem, can be a creative force for inclusion. And, as each of the artists in “The Displaced Person” proves, one is rarely found without the other. Freud viewed alienation as the by-product of a cultural divorce between man and his natural impulses. For the artists exhibited, it’s in the very gaps between body and ideology that one finds reconciliation between the two.
Performance artist Ron Athey’s installation Foot Washing Set w/ Blonde Hair Towel, 1996, typifies the artist’s melding of religious and BDSM rituals. A nod to the Christian practices of foot washing (see Luke 7:44), Athey’s twist on the tradition includes a handwoven towel made of hair, and a bloodstained cactus-spine brush. Here the body, or rather its sanguineous traces, becomes a symbolic site on which, as with Christian theology, dogma supercedes the physical. In Sue Williams’s My Oeuvre, 2005, the presentation of the body in fragments lays bare perceptual attitudes towards it. A cartoonish bioamorphous mass of sphincters, orifices, and bulbous mounds, Williams’s anatomical fantasy points far less to any recognizable specific sex organ than to collective impressions forced upon them.
With Walt Cassidy’s The Weeping Tower, 2011, the artist examines structures that impose both conformity and alterity on the body. Carbon photographic prints of idyllic male youths, framed within hand-drawn structures, reflect an eroticization of, and dislocation from, the male form. Tellingly, Cassidy’s choice of settings includes New York’s Jacob Riis beach—honoring a man who documented the blight of the industrial era’s downtrodden. Each of the works in this exhibition reminds us that those on the fringe often find themselves center stage.
— Joseph Akel

PRESS: The Displaced Person - Huffington Post

The Displaced Person - Huffington Post review

Walt Cassidy - Double Diamond, 2011

‘The Displaced Person’ Exhibition Examines The Spaces Of Participation And Alienation

Privacy is rapidly becoming a quaint notion of the past and the whole world seems to be turning into a giant public space. Displacement and exclusion become part of our daily lives as everything becomes a question of participation vs. alienation. The exhibition ‘The Displaced Person’ suggests that though it is often skewed negatively, exclusion is a virtue, and always has been.

The exhibition features work from Ron Athey, Walt Cassidy, Jesse Aron Green, Geof Oppenheimer and Sue WIlliams. Each approaches the sense of loss and isolation in the public sphere differently, yet they all share a sense of noble vexation. The eerie beauty of Ron Athey’s lone, hanging mass of blonde hair— real human hair, by the way— reminds us that sometimes beauty must be achieved through loneliness and discomfort, and the same can be said about art.

The exhibition runs at INVISIBLE EXPORTS until February 12 in New York.

PRESS: The Displaced Person - SAATCHI Magazine

The Displaced Person - Saatchi Magazine

DOUG McCLEMONT’S TOP TEN NEW YORK SHOWS-JANUARY By Doug McClemont · January 19, 2012

The Displaced Person at Invisible-Exports
Quickly becoming one of the coolest galleries in New York, Invisible Exports under the passionate direction of Risa Needleman and Benjamin Tischer, presents another winning group exhibition. Black and white drawings by Sue Williams, Queen of the Droopy Body Part, hang near Walt Cassidy’s handsome and haunting photo based works. Cassidy’s elegant touch coupled with his mystical reverence for romanticized locations—a transsexual beach, gay cruising locales—send us off in search of lost time. Works by Jesse Aron Green and Geof Oppenheimer are every bit as compelling. At the crowded opening, guests rubbed up against performance pioneer Ron Athey’s human hair towels, which were hung low to the ground, teased and tantalizing. Hopefully, this show marks Athey’s (overdue) return to New York’s gallery scene.
Through February 12^thwww.invisible-exports.com