March 11, 1999 - September 11, 1999
Artists and Sample Art:
Carl Hazlewood: Curator
Patricia A. Patton: Curatorial Associate
Ideas concerning identity and the ways in which individuals relate to various communities that form American society, were allowed to become part of the artistic discussion during the early nineties in a series of ground-breaking exhibitions. Chief among these was the Whitney Museum Biennial of 1993 which became the symbolic touchstone of this particular approach. However, the dogmatic socio-cultural critique, at the heart of many installations and objects produced at the time, tended to undermine the artistic and formal structure of such art.
The five artists included in PRESENT CONTINUOUS, are generally from immigrant and minority backgrounds, but they are not specifically concerned with establishing some sort of essentialized political or ethnic identity. They understand the shifting nature of those definitions--however they themselves may be individually defined.
They do not dwell in some pointlessly romanticized or problematized past, but all acknowledge the political significance of events both past and present.
The art in PRESENT CONTINUOUS works on many levels. Mainly, it inscribes the complexity of the hybrid American body, just as it is, into the shared experience of our international modernist story.
© Carl E. Hazlewood, curator
New York, 1999