Blaque Lyte Richmo’
Opening Saturday, June 9th 2012 at ADA Gallery, Richmond, VA.
Curated by Chris Kerr and Paul Nudd.
www.adagallery.com
A Good Monkey’s Brow is Hard to Eye
Before we set out to bring our show to Richmond, we first decided to avoid
driving across the ugly, soulless and utterly oppressive I-80 with all its
filthy oddities and anti-curiosities like Gary, Indiana, the Indiana Toll
Road, the Ohio Turnpike and Cleveland. We instead immediately agreed to
turn south right away in order to breath deep the ragweed and pollen
encrusted southern air. Living in Chicago, anything underneath Joliet is
considered by us to be the Deep South. We were also excited to be greeted
by the four story “HELL IS REAL” billboard on I-65, an old friend, that
has embodied Indiana’s knack for class and charm for several decades. In
no time we would be deep into the wilds of Kentucky, birthplace of Kerr, and then W.V., then
Virginia, then finally Richmo’, where we would be hanging a show of
day-glo phosphorescent cosmic American art with a handful of European
pieces thrown in for luck. One of our Mom’s wouldn’t let us spray paint
our lucky numbers on the side of her mini-van, but we stuffed it to the
gills with radioactive culture from all over the world. Besides, inspired
mid-trip, we made SATAN IS REAL signs for the back windows with some left
over archival cardboard we had from the merch table signage. Red states
are about survival.
It has been our great pleasure to have had the opportunity to drop a few
of our artists from the original Blaque Lyte show at the Hyde Park Art
Center in Chicago (only because change is good), and an even greater
pleasure to add a bunch from Chicago, out east and beyond. Entering into
a quintessentially Southern context we kept thinking of twisted gangly
webs of gnarled psychedelic Spanish Moss wrapped around beautiful pink
vintage ‘66 Streamline trailers filled with transgendered midgets training
elephants to slam dunk basketballs for quarters and beers. The closest we
came was the Waffle House and Monkey’s Eyebrow, KY, but we hope you enjoy
this newly vamped-up version of our freak out optical hiccup mind hump.
Paul Nudd & Chris Kerr
Curators
Blaque Lyte Richmo’ Artists:
Hanna Andersson, Mike Andrews, Able Brown, Lilli Carré, Bruce Conkle, Anya Davidson, Jo Dery, Michael Dumontier, Edie Fake, Neil Farber, Casey William Farnum, Sanya Glisic, Leif Goldberg, Keith Herzik, Brandon Heuser, Céline Hudréaux, Laurent Impeduglia, Klara Kristalova, Eric Lebofsky, David Leggett, Thomas Mazzarella, Benton Moss, Joakim Ojanen, Onsmith, Paintallica, Kristen Romaniszak, Marie Rosen, DeeDee Scacci, Seth Scriver, David Shrigley, Edra Soto, Ben Stone, Michael Swaney, Giselind von Wurmb, Michelle Wasson, Andrew Jeffrey Wright
