“Black Rabbit, White Hole”
MARCH 2 - APRIL 6, 2013
Presented as Samuel Freeman Gallery on La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles.
Black Rabbit, White Hole
March 2 - April 6, 2013
Nicholas Aguayo, Gabriele Beveridge (London), Jennifer Boysen, Claude Collins-Stracensky, Eduardo Consuegra, John Divola, Michael Dopp, Kim Fisher, Emilie Halpern, Barbara Kasten (Chicago), Alice Konitz, Chris Lipomi, Curtis Mann, Cameron Martin (NY), Ian Pedigo (NY), Isaac Resnikoff, Matt Saunders (Berlin), Melanie Schiff, Nils Schirrmacher, Daniel R. Small, Alice Walton (London)
Samuel Freeman presents Black Rabbit, White Hole, a group exhibition featuring artists based in and outside of Los Angeles. Spanning photographic, painting, sculptural, and mixed media works, the exhibition takes on—and reverses—the common literary tropes of the black hole and the white rabbit.
Much has been said about black holes. As a conundrum of space-time and literary metaphor, it is well accepted that a black hole pulls light and matter into eternal oblivion. Far more perplexing than the black hole’s endless void, however—and almost never referenced—the theoretical ‘white hole’ is its perfect inverse, with matter and luminescence endlessly escaping, but no point of entry or starting point for that light, whatsoever. In a similar fashion, within the realm of magic, folklore and symbology, the rarely mentioned black rabbit gets overlooked in favor of its docile, omnipresent white counterpart, yet is undoubtedly a more intriguing foil. Fast, elusive, sometimes ominous, and easily camouflaged into darkness, the black rabbit is slippery.
Attempting to tonally capture this intuitive mid-moment between inversion of logic and poetic switch, the exhibition Black Rabbit, White Hole combines works that embrace, transpose or subvert metaphorical, logical, or material understandings of lightness, darkness, reflection and disappearance. Equally represented is work that is bound to binaries, inverse relationships, or bipolarities. The exhibition’s numerous photographic works probe relevant zones of abstraction and experimentation, both specific to the medium and in their relationship to sculpture and painting; large photographic pairs from John Divola’s Dark Star series and Barbara Kasten’s Studio Constructs preside as key touchstones for a younger generation’s rampant exploration of the photographic. Mono- and bi-chromatic paintings crystallize current tensions between the allure of photomechanical/digital processes and the painterly gesture; and sculptural works of primitive geometries and humble or natural materials set up a dialogue between the roughly handmade/idiosyncratic and the highly polished or reductive. Placed together, these works elicit moments that are at once shadowy, luminous, and intuitively complex.
