Exhibition

EXO EMO

Curated by Antoine Catala and Vera Alemani

8th Floor

Press Release

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Installation view, Exo Emo, Greene Naftali, New York, 2017

I feel this way in my daily life.

Somewhere between a portrait and an investment, unconditional though contractual; I have become quite attached.

Wendy flirts and seems to love me the way she loves her cat.

Making work for me is compulsive — I keep thinking how irrational I am, how irrational it is.

My emotional relationship to the work is ambivalent because it was designed to artificially trigger a real emotional response. Also, the work vacillates between horror and humor, so it ideally produces contradictory emotional responses.

In this communal nightmare, fleeting visual attributes of nine lives become vivid by enlargement—unexpectedly captured, made public. These enlargements personalize nine people, who in their normal workday were thrown by impact into a gravitational plunge, or chose to escape incineration by leaping into space.

I am the Fils de l’os and I got a sister.
She wears a blue corset modeling her unique bone.

It scared me, or I scared myself in making it.

mild skin irritation, possibility of long-term sensitization with repeated contact

I enjoy teasing it, hurting it in a way it might imagine itself becoming more pure, and then cradling it, saving it when it realized it drank too much.

Presented singly or in groups, [the works] invite a range of associations: they look like something you might find in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Asian Art department or in the storefront windows of Tiffany & Co., but they could also be behemoth chess pieces or cartoon abstractions of an English bobby.

I hate pink, however, I am a great admirer of the Pink Panther. I was so scared to work with pink that a collaboration was the best way to help my fear.

If these weren't made by me, my wife would like them better.

The work is comedy.

When this work was first shown it was considered to be vapid. Some viewers wrote mean things in the gallery sign-in book.

john and I mimicked the style from the gallery owner marc jancou.
we got even a wig and restyled his overlapping cut before we pushed the mannequin over the cliff.

[I know of no country] where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property [than the United States].

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