Good Children Gallery

Skills: Duplex 2012-2018

“GOOD CHILDREN GALLERY PRESENTS: ‘MATERIAL’ ”

July 10th – July 30th 2015

“Material” is the first in the series of exhibitions “Good Children Gallery Presents:” conceived as an exchange between the artist run spaces Good Children gallery from New Orleans, and Duplex 100m2 from  Sarajevo

Artists:     Christopher Saucedo (US), Generic Art Solutions (US/UK), Dan Tague (US)s, Malcolm McClay (US/IR), and Lala Raščić (HR/BiH/USA)

“Good Children Gallery Presents:” is a series of exhibitions conceived as an ongoing exchange between Good Children Gallery from New Orleans and Sarajevo’s Duplex100m2. The exchange will spread out across 2015 and 2016. “Good Children Gallery Presents:” will highlight the work of artists promoted by these two artist-run spaces, and promote the dialog between New Orleans’ and Sarajevo’s burgeoning, independent, art scenes. “Good Children Gallery Presents:” exhibition series will unfold over four exhibitions of Good Children Gallery members in Sarajevo and one exhibition in New Orleans, curated by Duplex100m2. The four Sarajevo shows are loosely grouped around concepts of Material, Color, Form, and Spirit, accommodating for the diverse artistic practices within the Good Children Gallery collective.

The exhibition “Good Children Gallery Presents: ‘Material’ ” features work of artists Christopher Saucedo, Generic Art Solutions, Dan Tague, Malcolm McClay, and Lala Raščić. Material is taken as term that morphs into concepts of source material, material as cloth, materialism, material as capitalism, violence, and revolt in contact with the work of the artists presented in the exhibition, reflections of strained societies. Last few years have been intense in the U.S., to focus on just New Orleans, the city has seen its share of environmental and manmade devastation ranging from Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, sink holes, high poverty, and murder rates, all seeming to pave a way to galloping gentrification of the city, turning someone’s misery into other man’s profit. With capitalism and democracy disappointing some of its members, we can maintain a bleak outlook. In the U.S., tensions exploding in Baltimore are not unrelated to the issues addressed by the Occupy movement. Class and economic struggle is real, revolution is possible, the people are willing to fight, but before we casts the first stone, we have to analyze and articulate.

Boris Buden says in a January 2015 Al Jazeera interview: “…there is a struggle for bare existence in the capitalist reality, many repressed forms of class struggle. There is a culture of resistance in which a new generation of young, courageous people who do not accept this kind of reality is growing up in.” A similar sentiment is present in the “Material” show.

The exhibited works include drawings by McClay, based on the failed real-estate bubble in Ireland, Saucedos’ suggestive soft sculptures – embroidered blood towels, Tague’s already-iconic folded dollar bill prints, G.A.S. flammable videos “Molotov” and “Fuse,” and Rascic’s video “The Eumenides,” a feminist revolutionary augmentation on J.P. Sartre’s drama “The Flies.”

This year marks anniversaries of events that left profound impressions on both Sarajevo and New Orleans, with 2015 marking 20 years from the Dayton agreement and the Srebrenica massacre, and 10 years from hurricane Katrina. Now is the time to strike up the conversation between Sarajevo and New Orleans.

The Eumenides_Lala Rascic

Lala Raščić, The Eumenides

No Future_Dan TagueDan Tague, No Future

Molotov_Generic Art Solutions Generic Art Solutions, Molotov

Malcolm MacClayMalcam MacClay, Dreenan

Portrait, Tue Dec 30, 2014, 12:20:49 PM, 16C, 8062x10842,  (342+3), 150%, bent 6 stops,  1/40 s, R109.9, G86.8, B94.4

Christopher Saucedo, self portrait