Curator’s Statement

Some of the most original and compelling art in America is tucked away in the nooks and crannies of the street – stickers, stencils, drawings, wheatpastes and murals, the mysterious and always personal graffiti of anonymous street artists. /Anonymous Rage/ offers work by seven Baltimore- and Washington, D.C.-based artists and graffiti writers as an example of the evolving new idiom of street art.

It’s a genre whose birthplace can be traced to a 1960s-era ice cream truck in the Bronx, where a tagger wrote his name and street number, creating what became the most prevalent visual phenomenon in New York: subway graffiti.

Subway graffiti was a way of “getting up,” of shouting “Look at /me/,” of creating self-advertisements and raging against the anonymous public façade. This notion of /anonymous rage/ is the reason why street art can be so visually extravagant – and why many contemporary artists are now using it as a unique aesthetic.

The scribbles of a wandering tagger are everywhere in Carl Thurman’s visionary abstractions, here, while the flat color and razor-sharp line of Alicia Cosnahan’s nude women bring to mind stencils and wheatpastes. Gangling alien humanoids are as crudely rendered as an electrical box drawing in Kelly Towles’s work, with images repeated again and again as if tagged by King of the 2/3 train.

Graffiti’s fascination with emotional decay is the basis for Shadow’s spare, quiet paintings, where a “Blue Man” superhero finds himself isolated in moonscapes before breaking of canvas, finally, to grab at the gallery space with cable arms.

Found street trash is the building block of Emily C-D’s installation, where each anonymous personal item receives new meaning by placement into a Tetris-like urbanized wall. The dumpster-dived furniture of Chris LaVoie’s “exploded living room” piece amplifies this found-object anonymous rage by alluding to physical violence. Kelli Ryan’s skateboard hangs from the ceiling like a casualty.

When I first told people I was curating a “Street Art” exhibition, many wondered how such a thing was possible. When graffiti is removed from the street, doesn’t it lose its authenticity? My reply: Street art can exist as much in the imagination as it does in the street. These works simply bridge the gap between the two.

– Justin Gershwin

“Anonymous Rage”/ runs from July 14 to August 31, 2007

Opening Reception is Saturday, July 14th 7pm - 9pm