Valentine is pleased to present
OK for Now
Matt Freedman and Jude Tallichet
Opening Friday January 15, from 6:00 - 9:00
The exhibit runs through Sunday February 14
Please be aware of our new hours and extended run
“All solutions are temporary”
-Anonymous, but everybody seems to say it sooner or
later
A lifetime of making a life
and art with another person leaves a deep impression on both parties. We are
altered by the presence of the other. The scars of our cohabitation become beauty marks, acquired fingerprints
that identify us to each other and leave us incompatible with any other person. Nothing is ever settled in any relationship,
and everything is up for negotiation, but after awhile a certain understanding
is achieved. Lifelong partnerships,
those twitchy stalemates with our beloved others, are all too finite, but as
long as they do survive they seem to take forever.
OK for Now
is a joint installation of sculptures by Matt Freedman and Jude Tallichet, two
artists who have spent 30 years deeply involved in each other’s business, rendering
their exhibition a kind of conversation of objects between codependents. Using
the vertical space of Valentine Gallery to maximum effect, Freedman and
Tallichet deploy their pieces at all levels of the cubic volume of the gallery,
from the floor to the ceiling, from wall to wall. The two artists have created
flimsy support structures that clumsily present the work of the other via the
deployment of any number of rickety racks, awkward altars, gimpy gibbets, tippy
tripods and frail flagpoles that display and endanger works drawn from the Jude
and Matt’s voluminous inventories. The
effort is to embrace and enhance the cherished work of the cherished companion,
but the result all too often is to distort and endanger that which is adored. The
effect is both tender and highly unstable.
The pieces seem to be at risk, as is any viewer who might edge cautiously
through the space.
Of course, there is no danger. It’s only art, though the effect is
real. The illusion of looming disaster
can provoke as authentic an embodied response as the real thing. That too is art. The really tricky part was
surviving long enough to get here.
