[caption id="attachment_4953" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Suntek Chung"][/caption]
This week is all about the fairs in Miami. Crowds of collectors, curators, dealers, writers, hangers-on, and artists are just now arriving in Southern Florida for one of the biggest art events of the year. There will be more events each night than you could ever attend and even more art to see every day at all of the dozens of satellite fairs. If at some point you find yourself in need of a break from the masses, it will be worth your while to check out the appropriately named “Herd Thinner” exhibition curated by David Hunt at the Charest-Weinberg Gallery. It opens December 1 and is on view through February 28 and will feature work by 12 artists, including Slater Bradley, Suntek Chung, Rashid Johnson, Fernando Mastrangelo, and Seher Shah. A week before the show’s opening we spoke with Hunt, well known for his heady, themed shows, about his role as shepherd.
WHITEWALL: Eric Charest-Weinberg opened his gallery just last year. Howyou’re your relationship with him develop?
DAVID HUNT: The artist he showed last year was from Montreal, Marc Seguin and that is an artist that I’d worked with in the past. Marc commissioned me to write a catalogue essay for his show at Charest-Weinberg and since I was in Miami for the opening I went and Eric and I struck up a friendship. He retained me as a consultant for the gallery, which turned into a director position.
Eric is 25, which is pretty young for owning a gallery of that magnitude. I’m 40 and have been doing this for about 13-14 years. The artists that are going to be showing at the gallery have had two or three solo shows, they’ve done some museum stuff, they have some experience. Rather than a 25 year-old kid building from the group up we are seriously skipping some of these growing pains that you might associate with running a gallery.
WW: How did you come up with the theme behind this exhibition?
DH: My shows are different than other shows because they all have themes and they tend to be fairly abstract and rarified. About six months ago I read Thomas Friedman’s Hot Flat and Crowded and that book blew me away. Essentially Thomas Friedman and many other geo-political analysts think that in 2050 the planet will have two more China’s worth of population aspiring to a middle class lifestyle. In general, it’s a conflation of the extreme past and the extreme future. All of this goes back to Robert Smithson’s notion of the zero zone, which is “When space age and stone age attitude overlap in a Jurassic swamp on Mars.” In my mind and when I talked to the artist it’s not this dystopic, post-Armageddon deal. What it’s really supposed to be is that because artists control semiosis or the sign they’ve evolved beyond regular humans; they will be the ones privileged in society.
[caption id="attachment_4956" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Raha Raissnia"][/caption]
WW: So that’s where the title of the show, “Herd Thinner,” comes in?
DH: The concept of “Herd Thinner” has many definitions. As one of the curators, I’m one of the herd thinners. The artists themselves are herd thinners in the sense that I’m putting together this show of artists from essentially the same generation who are all successful. The third would if you can imagine one of the artists in the show wandering around in the desert and the objects they make are ruins, a stonehenge, some kind of Easter Island of the mind and other people, mere mortals that are wandering through the same desert, find these objects and they become an orientation device, a mapping device.
It’s not necessarily about anything. What I try to explain is that because we are operating in the emotion economy and everything is intangible, I’m trying to control the mood. So the vibe, the atmosphere of the show I can be specific about. The what is hard to pin down but the feeling is not.
WW: And so the artists are reacting to that feeling? There work is emblematic of that feeling?
DH: You walk into the gallery and you will have a somber, forlorn feeling. It’s definitely dark but the idea is that these are not shiny baubles. This is not pop. What it comes out of is a deeply personal and unique symbolic language that is of the artists. That language has to do, usually, with materials. Theses artists use specific materials that no other artist uses. A perfect example of that is Rashid Johnson. Rashid will be using black soap and shea butter in the manner of the way Joseph Beuys used fat as this semi conductor to transport you into a spiritual realm. Rashid would invite someone to go up to the work, put their hands in the shea butter, apply it to their body and that becomes this inductive balm that can transport you into the afro-futuristic plain.
WW: Or like Fernando Mastrangelo, whose use of material is always at the center of his art. I heard in this show he’s using actual human ash?
DH: Yeah. I didn’t know this but apparently when someone is cremated what they hand you in the urn is only 10% of the ashes. And the rest is basically thrown away. So he went around to all these funeral parlors in LA and collected the ashes of dead MS-13 gang members. And basically made this slab like painting using the abstract tattoo motifs of the gang members.
WW: Did he develop a relationship with any of the gang members to get approval or clearance to use the ashes?
DH: He has one contact that he made through a Indie documentary filmmaker. That guy has been instrumental in Fernando getting the ashes.
[caption id="attachment_4955" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Seher Shah, The Expansion Complex I, 2009. "][/caption]
