FOLIO
OPENING RECEPTION: July 10, 7-10 pm
EXHIBITION DATES: July 9-14, 2015
Non-Fiction Gallery, Savannah
GALLERY HOURS: Thursday (by appointment), Saturday, Sunday, Monday, 1-5 pm
Non-Fiction Gallery presents Heart of Butter, the Sugar Uncoating by Savannah College of Art and Design MFA candidate Madeleine Peck Wagner. These investigative drawings and sculptures examine ideas of beauty, power, trickery, fatness, and ugliness; and how those notions intersect. Here, Peck Wagner mines her own experiences in order to reconcile perceptions of the inner and outer self. This willingness to engage in an extended conversation around absurdity, discomfort, and the extraordinary is, at its core, an emotionally tangled call for compassion cloaked in the tropes of art history and luxury commodities. As the artist explains:
“…even as I seek to transform that which is examined, I find myself uncomfortable in the changing role that I have instigated; if I am being very honest here, I’d attempt to sequester these works and ideas away. Because they tackle that which is my greatest secret and my most un-armorable part: my fatness. This places my works in the realm of the politically activated, yet, my own perception is still grey enough that I can cite Thomas Hirschhorn: “I need to work politically, concretely, like an activist but an activist w/out a cause and without an organization.” This idea calls to me because it gives me the phrasing to talk about my own bipolar understanding of my own work. For even as I strive to make beautiful, highly aestheticized objects as I myself might strive to activate within a beauty framework, I am often at sixes and sevens; thus as I make, I look for at the moment of making, “a precarious monument, a monument for a limited time.”
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