Frustrating the Barrier
A Group Exhibition of the Artist Rebirth Cycle 2024 / Opening 11/1!
The Pack is excited to announce Frustrating the Barrier, a group exhibition of the Artist Rebirth Cycle 2024 participants. The Artist Rebirth Cycle is a nine month course designed to nurture the birth and rebirth of artistic self identity. The artists on view spent the greater part of the past year gestating new modes of thinking, visualizing, and birthing new bodies of work. Through a diverse array of installation, painting, sculpture, and multimedia, the exhibition invites viewers to reflect on what separates and connects us, both individually and collectively. The title ‘Artist’ often comes with a self-imposed barrier, which many of the participants in this course have successfully dissolved.
Do barriers frustrate us or do we frustrate them? From the cellular to the corporeal to the spiritual to the political, barriers distinguish an inside from an out. These selectively permeable gateways give structure to formlessness in a living, breathing, ever-changing system. A barrier can protect as much as it can expose, it can soothe as much as frustrate. The word barrier often conjures an outsider— someone or something that cannot pass. But what happens when the outsider discovers the barrier is her own? With a bit of frustration to the logic that upholds it, a barrier is quite simple to dissolve.
The artists of Frustrating the Barrier invite you to consider that our most frustrating barriers can perhaps be dismantled if we frustrate them back. Is there really a barrier between the living and the dead? Can our consciousness not dissolve into the patterns of our climate? What happens when a critical mind uproots itself from religious law, collecting new mythologies from its own embodied reality? And how do newborn realities emerge? Do they erupt out of secrecy? Do they incubate in a mythical cave? Or do these small gods grow so low to the ground in a garden that they humbly go unseen? Does one reality birth from another in a complex c-section of consciousness? Each cut out in a wavelike contraction with its own unique shape? In order to dissolve a barrier we must first understand who it belongs to. And if it is ours, while it may not be ours alone, we might just have the creative agency to disown it.
— Sarah Grass, Curator and Founder of The Pack
𝙒𝙝𝙚𝙣: Nov 1-Nov 3
-Opening reception Friday, Nov 1, 6-8pm
-Visiting Hours, 11/2-11/3, 12-6pm
𝙒𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚: The Pack Studio
526 W26th St. #807
New York, NY 10001
𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙠𝙨 𝙗𝙮:
Andy Kang
Alejandra Jimenez Arellano
Hemmendy Nelson