Co-curated by Cortney Lane Stell and Amber Cobb
Artists: Theresa Anderson, Jason Below, Abby Bennett, Jaime Carrejo, Tobias Fike, Matthew Harris, Irene McCray, Dmitri Obergfell, Nikki Pike, Bruce Price, Zach Reini, Laura Shill, Rebecca Vaughan and Xi Zhang
Exhibition Dates: February 8-24, 2013
For 33 years, Pirate: Contemporary Art has maintained a tradition as being one of Denver’s edgiest artist run galleries. Denver’s artist community is uniquely served by Pirate and a variety of spaces that support and encourage high quality art making and conversations of an experimental/ experiential nature.
Excited by new conversations happening in the now and real, member Theresa Anderson invited Amber Cobb and Cortney Lane Stell to co-curate an exhibition that continues the conversation from the Stuff(ed) exhibition at Laundry on Lawrence. Stell and Cobb’s co-curated exhibition, Soft Subversions, focuses its attention on the ability of artworks made of soft materials to quietly subvert our understanding of the world around us.
The title of the exhibition comes from Felix Guattari’s “Soft Subversion”, a culmination of essays, texts, and interviews from 1977-1985. Soft Subversions uses concepts from Guattari to investigate the discursive opportunity provided by artworks, which through their material are innately approachable. The artworks in the exhibition take advantage of the many associations with the concept of “Soft,” from the benign to the grotesque. These artworks have the unique power in their ability to softly suggest freedom from a mass-marketed, over produced, over socialized, capitalist society.
“Production for the sake of production – the obsession with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist market or in planned economies – leads to monstrous absurdities. The only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a continuous fashion.” ~ Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis and Difference and Repetition 21
