We Lived Happily During the War
Michael Allgoewer, Jordan Baseman, Denise Hawrysio, Marc Hulson, Rebecca Scott, and Stanislav Turina
We lived happily during the war
And when they bombed other
people's houses, we
Protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I
was
in my bed, around my bed
America
was falling: invisible house
by invisible house by
invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of
money in
the city of
the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
Ilya Kaminsky
Copyright © 2013 by Ilya Kaminsky
And when they bombed other people's houses, we
Protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
Ilya Kaminsky
Copyright © 2013 by Ilya Kaminsky
In We Lived Happily During the War, curator Denise Hawrysio brings together an international group of artists to explore themes of war, notions of dislocated landscape, and supernatural fictional narratives. The title of this exhibition is borrowed from Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky, whose poem voices the guilt and cognitive dissonance felt by the speaker while a distant war is raging. In the poem, as in this exhibition, love, joy and laughter mingle with grief and trauma.
Michael Allgoewer is a Canadian artist whose work consists mainly of assemblage-based sculptural components, often combined in larger installations. Aside from conspicuous allusions to stigmata and the crowns of thorns, his work in this exhibition, Handout, is a poignant metaphor for sacrifice, suffering and existential pain.
Jordan Baseman’s video in this exhibition consists of a fast-moving landscape filmed from a speeding vehicle, with blurred treetops and foliage. The horizon is flipped 90 degrees, so the dividing line between sky and earth appears vertically and nearly abstract, straddling the fine line between curiosity and paranoia.
Denise Hawrysio, who is of Ukrainian descent, responds directly to the war. Juxtaposing images excised from old National Geographic magazines with contemporary war imagery, unexpected links are invariably forged, producing a primordial emotional tug between revulsion and fascination and probing the complacency of the gaze.
Rendered in sombre, muted greens and yellows, London-based artist Marc Hulson’s recent paintings survey an enclosed pictorial world — a socio-symbolic realm in which a succession of figures, both human and non-human, play out uncertain roles.
Rebecca Scott’s work in this show, The Meat, is a series of paintings emerging from the inherent conflicts surrounding notions of ‘the romantic’ and ‘the real’, and, most particularly, in the dichotomy of idealised nature and the realities of farming. The work takes reference from picture-postcards and supermarket catalogues, adding another layer of irony by seeing both meat and landscape as consumable products.
Stanislav Turina is a Ukrainian artist, writer, and curator who lives in Kyiv. His works in this exhibition, from the series Endless Still Life, are fragile drawings which depict a world of seemingly random objects, both obscure and full of pathos.
Images: Denise Hawrysio, Stanislav Turina, Marc Hulson, Michael Allgoewer, Jordan Baseman, Rebecca Scott