Vintage Violence

Nayland Blake, Richard Bosman, Angela Dufresne, Carroll Dunham, Judy Glantman, Nancy Grossman, Lyle Ashton Harris, Vera Iliatova, Tony Matelli, Norman Paris, Dasha Shishkin, Tommy White

Curated by Monya Rowe and George Rush

brave

brāv/

adjective

adjective: brave; comparative adjective: braver; superlative adjective: bravest

1. ready to face and endure danger or pain; showing courage.

Vintage Violence will feature work that explores violence in complex and often personal ways. Works that are full of content and deal in discomfort, bad behavior, ethical quandary, embarrassing openness, power and vulnerability. They continue to find new forms for difficult subject matter. The organizers of the show see a connection to a tradition of difficult work: writers like Poe, Burroughs and Acker, artists like Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer, and Louise Bourgeois, musicians such as Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Marianne Faithful, films of Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Paul Schrader and Catherine Breillat.

Give me crack and anal sex

Take the only tree that's left

and stuff it up the hole

in your culture

Give me back the Berlin wall

give me Stalin and St Paul

I've seen the future, brother: 
it is murder.

- Leonard Cohen, The Future

George Rush received his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. This year he had solo exhibitions at the Canzani Center Gallery at Columbus College of Art and Design and the GAR Gallery at the Galveston Artist Residency in Galveston, Texas. He has received awards from New York Foundation of the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he is on the faculty at The Ohio State University.