A.B.NORMAL

JUNE 23 - SEPTEMBER 10, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 
A.B.NORMAL
A group exhibition featuring: John Bock, Bob Gramsma, Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg, Tim Hawkinson, Josephine Meckseper, and Rirkrit Tiravanija
 
Exhibition dates: June 23 – September 10, 2005
Opening reception: Thursday, June 23rd between

6:00 – 8:00 PM
 
Dr. Frankenstein:            Would you mind telling me… whose brain… I did put in?
Igor:                             And you won’t be angry?
Dr. Frankenstein:            I will not… be… angry.
Igor:                             Abby someone.
Dr. Frankenstein:            Abby someone… Abby who?
Igor:                             Abby Normal.
Dr. Frankenstein:            Abby Normal.
Igor:                             I’m almost sure that was the name.
 
- Mel Brooks, from the film Young Frankenstein
 
The voice of Gene Wilder howling “It’s alive!” echoes the work of John Bock, Bob Gramsma, Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg, Tim Hawkinson, Josephine Meckseper and Rirkrit Tiravanija.  With masterful timing, each puts the “d” in deadpan.  From the popcorn-spewing pants of John Bock; to the buttons on Tim Hawkinson’s pile of laundry that metamorphosize into paranoid eyes tracking the viewer’s every move; to the anesthetizing of the building with a morphine drip in Bob Gramsma’s mysterious surgery prep piece; to Josephine Meckseper’s “unfashionable” faux-pas displaying a playful, artistic anti-ego; to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s worship of Sponge Bob-ian utopia; to Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg’s full-scale polystyrene Zamboni, it is a close encounter of the fourth kind.  If Frankenstein were in search of a brain, then these works, full of grey matter, all seem to be in search of a body that never quite materializes but is nonetheless eerily present.  In a room thick with obsession, mania, dementia, pathos, inventiveness and empathy, these artists summon the ghosts of our time.