Opening Reception for Rough Gems: Dirty Abstraction

Dirty Abstraction
opening reception: Thursday, January 18, 6-8 pm
on view: January 18–February 10, 2024

Dirty Abstraction is the first of three exhibition as a part of Union Hall’s Rough Gems Curatorial Program, an annual open call for curatorial proposals from new and emerging curators.

Curated by Jennifer Lord, ‘Dirty Abstraction’ proposes an abstraction that communicates and contains cultural, ecological, political, and/or spiritual content. It is abstraction that pushes against traditional notions of pure form and into critical content. The work here is contingent, intersectional, and coded, interjecting shifting nuance. Each artist in the show has a different approach to how they make the content of their work legible, to whom, and to what degree they allow their work to be illegible. The exhibition explores the contradiction of does it matter / it doesn’t matter how much the viewer gets.

Exhibiting artists include Joan Anderson, Paula Damasceno, Anthony Garcia Sr., Noah Travis Phillips, Claire A. Warden, and Jen Wohlner.