Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Naming the Animals Exhibit at Curious Matter Jersey City, NJ

April 3 at Curious Matter
www.curiousmatter.blogspot.com/

As we get ready for our collaborative, 2-part exhibition, Naming The Animals, Proteus Gowanus is already deep into their inquiry on PARADISE. Here's more from the excellent folks along the canal:

Every September at Proteus Gowanus, a nine-month investigation is launched, using art, artifacts, books, workshops and performance in pursuit of a single theme. Multiple avenues are traversed in an interdisciplinary search for understanding and inspiration. This year’s theme, Paradise, has been examined in two exhibitions and through numerous events, using multiple media as tools: paint, video, clay, diagrams, maps, poetry, soup, sermons and song. As we were planning the third and final chapter of Paradise, our friends at Curious Matter proposed a collaboration: they would install an exhibit within our exhibit which would focus on a most curious event that took place within the walls of Paradise: the naming of the animals.

Myth says that naming the animals is an obligation assigned to humankind at the creation and it is one that has never ceased to demand attention: the task of naming, ordering, cataloging, dividing, pairing, discerning, describing, speaking…. Indeed, Paradise itself, where naming first began, was a place divided and separated, which is why its beatific presence bedevils us. As the exhibitions at Proteus Gowanus and Curious Matter attest, these paradisiacal topics have a light and a dark side.

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