The Temporary Institute of Emancipated Objects focuses its attention on the renewal of the object through use of artists’ reuse and appropriation. The four artists exhibited—Brett Windham, Barry Anderson, Humberto Duque, and Whitney Lynn—use the human-made material world around them to cull materials, inspiration, and concept form.

The object-oriented works in the exhibition can be articulated as the disruption or collapsing of the ground on which we stand and simultaneously reflect on the artist's considerable curiosity about the infinite variety of life. The goal of the works featured is not to arrive at a settled view, but to achieve greater clarity about what is really at issue, about what is really at stake in a given debate, the heterogeneous possibilities of the material world around us. Here at its most basic essence the (art) object functions as the combatant against objective reality by ungrounding the objects around us.

Barry Anderson’s single channel non-linear animations are created, in part, from appropriated American advertising images of the 1950s to 1970s. Featured in this exhibition are four works that offer unsettling surveillance of the landscape of objects around us. Anderson currently lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri. He has exhibited widely in national institutions such as the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Syracuse University, and the Kansas City Art Institute.

Brett Windham’s sculptures and collages are derived from materials found during her walks around New York City. The sculptures are composed with the mindset of a bowerbird; compulsively picking and grouping attractive colors as they appear. The accumulated materials take on draped tassel-like forms that reference talismans, fetishistic objects imbued with meaning. Windham’s works touch on the complexity of ways of seeing our everyday landscapes.

Whitney Lynn’s installation and sculptural works highlight the psychological barriers found in everyday objects. Her work gives rise to observations that transcend familiar experience. In this exhibition, Lynn will create several new works, notably a large outdoor igloo made from ice created in a Snow Cone machine. Lynn holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has had several solo shows including Sculptures Involontaires seen at Steven Wolf Fine Arts in San Francisco.

Humberto Duque’s works involve humor, irony, and sinister sharpness, similar to Duchamp’s ready-mades. His works often propose some sort of absurd solution for common objects, like a tablecloth lazily blowing in the wind created by four battery-operated fans. Duque’s work has been featured on the Art21 blog and he has had solo exhibitions at Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan and the MCO Arte Contemporânea in Portugal, just to name a few.

Opening Reception
Thursday, January 10
5 - 8 pm
Philip J. Steele Gallery