May 9 - June 6, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 9, 6:30 - 8 pm
Curator's Office is pleased to present drawings and photographs by celebrated Southern artist Chris Scarborough. In these works, the artist -- whether by meticulous drawing or digital alteration -- creates a world that has survived some kind of ambiguous cataclysm and we are now being given a glimpse into a new reality in its aftermath The big bang has happened, but just what kind of bang has taken place? The world we are presented with is similar to the one we know, but things are askew and a bit more absurd. The individuals in these works are distorted or fractured as their identities shift into a post-human condition.
Drawing on diverse influences such as Japanese anime cartoons, science fiction, the mass media and real life, Scarborough creates characters and environments that explore the grey areas that happen when cultural and media boundaries are eroded and crossed. The artist loves to "challenge our notion of reality and our ideals," especially when images are placed in contexts that we think we understand but then realize we don't. For the artist, his use of anime is an investigation of that idea, because he plucks images from Japanese pop culture that have a specific context, transforms them from their original stylized environment into something he deems more "real," and then offers in the outlandish new results.
His figures have been compared to the paintings of contemporary cartoonish ironist John Currin by critic Jerry Cullum. Scarborough is additionally engaged in an ongoing provocative relationship with art history where, in the artist's words, "modernist painting walks around on all fours and chews its cud." The constructed realities of post-modernism and the slippery assumed identities of contemporary pop culture flesh out the picture in these five drawings and three photographs.
Chris Scarborough has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Foley Gallery, New York, NY; Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Lousiana Tech University Gallery, Ruston, LA; TAG Gallery, Nashville, TN; Artspace, Raleigh, NC; Rhodes College Gallery, Memphis, TN; Gescheidle Projects, Chicago, IL; Zeitgeist, Nashville, TN; Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, VA; Swanson Reed Contemporary, Louisville, KY; Sarratt Gallery at Vanderbilt Univeristy, Nashville, TN; Gallery House, New Orleans, LA; and Momus Gallery, Atlanta, GA. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Scion Exhibition Space, Los Angeles, CA; Copro Nason Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Curator's Office, Washington, DC; Judith Racht Gallery, Harbert, MI; Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, FL; Redux Center for Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC; Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL; Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL; and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN among others. His work is in the public collections of the Tennessee State Museum, 21C Museum, Lipscomb University, ReVive Skincare, and The Tullman Collection.