Nothing For Itself - October at A Gathering of the Tribes

Nothing For Itself
Paintings of Diversity, Born In the Middle of Salad
October 1-31
Opening Saturday Oct. 3rd 6 pm
Tribes Gallery
285 E. 3rd St. 2nd floor
New York, NY 10009

A show of young emerging artists in irrationally exuberant involvement with the city, curated by Janet Bruesselbach with Allison Moore, Jason Talley, and JS Flores


The diversity of these artists emerges in contrast with their similarity. They are occupied both with the human body and with the tactility of paint. Representation gives itself over to the object and submits to an orgy of feedback. This is not art for its own sake, but anything for the sake of anything else. Vivacity is exchange between a body and its environment, and New York in its still-modern postmodernity enlivens our images. Yet we contradict the self-aggrandizement demanded by a capitalized art market, in a continuous chain of promoting others. Chaotic and yet completely intentional, these funnels for desire, their entropy, and the life of objects that they suggest, make for a colorful carnival of the Fall.

Allison Moore generates neo-cubist responses to market environments, in lurid, intoxicated colors and shapes. She's bicoastal.

Jason Talley assembles superbly rendered figures and toys into Freudian-tinged erotic tableau, playing with explicitness and our resistance to it.

JS Flores engages the surface of figurative paintings, mating visual effects with tactility. His figures are warped by their media, giving them a powerful presence. This engages a destructive tension towards human flesh.

Janet Bruesselbach improvisationally composes surreal oil paintings with a playful disregard for gravity and depth, in which everything is figure.

As well as being a vivid image, "born in the middle of salad" is that anti-utopian metaphor of New York not as melting pot but, in the imperfect way of all metaphors, a multi-cultural, multi-directional conglomeration of tastes.

For more information, contact janet@bruesselbach.com / (310) 617-3366


Please come! Tribes is having some financial and anticipating legal difficulties, and for them to stay a Lower East Side institution, Steve Cannon needs your support.