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Showing posts from March, 2013

Connie Bostic at the Flood Gallery

Connie Bostic’s exhibition comes at a particularly interesting time when the conversation about gun control has been rekindled by the violent events of the past couple years, especially the school shootings and mass murders in places like Connecticut and Colorado and the craziness of violent outbursts by right wing extremism in Norway, punctuated and/or capped off by the obscene pronouncements and gestures by the NRA. It is not surprising that the spokespeople for the NRA issued such crazy platitudes like “the only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”. This is the pinnacle to which their own ideological fortitude extends. Let us not for a second forget that the ideological underpinnings of such a pronouncement lies in the mythology laid down at the dawn of the American revolution. America is the only place that has actually codified its mythology in a legislative document, the constitution and its amendments. Mythology begat as law. Figures like Mit

The Modern Anxiety, Buzludzha and the American Superhero

I will try and piggyback a little bit on what I thought was the most asked question, or at least what I felt was the most perplexing image or idea, during the night of the opening of my latest solo show “apotheosis”. The image is that of the Buzludzha monument and I have described the piece this way “On a lone mountaintop in a Bulgarian national park sits one of the most perplexing and perhaps ironic monuments to late 20th century socialism. Built in the waning years of Eastern European socialism, when the writing on the walls was already running out of walls, this monument celebrated the revolutionary spirit in such a way as if the sheer spectacle would be able to carry through the intended ideology, that everything is just great the way it is. The hyperinflated ego of such a project constitutes the dramatization of what occurs naturally in every culture faced with its own impending doom. Instead of reflection and reassessment, we get bombastic displays of confidence in the exist