LISA BLAS

TYLER HEALY

PAUL WEINER

Flag Me Down, Pick Me Up

Opening Reception: Friday, November 30, 2018

6pm - 8pm

On View: November 30 - December 31, 2018

MARQUEE PROJECTS is pleased to present Flag Me Down, Pick Me Up, a group exhibition featuring recent artworks by Lisa Blas, Tyler Healy and Paul Weiner. A reception for the artists will be held on Friday, November 30th from 6pm to 8pm.

The artists brought together in this show will exhibit work that shares a common interest in the use of the American flag. Flags, in general, have much to do with traditional tribal tendencies and notions of identity: the idea of “us versus them.” But in today’s heated political climate it’s “us versus us,” with divided factions claiming that their allegiance to America is stronger than that of others. This exhibition hopes to bring about greater dialogue on what role the American flag, and what it signifies, now play. Can we pick up the pieces, strive to reduce conflict, and promote a greater sense of unity, peace and equality?

Contact: Mark Van Wagner and Tonja Pulfer:  INFO@MARQUEEPROJECTS.ORG
MARQUEE PROJECTS
14 Bellport Lane, Bellport NY 11713
(631) 803-2511

Flashback Friday, or, into the future.

After the recent events in Charlottesville, I am posting a partial image from Meet Me at the Mason Dixon: A project in painting, photography and installation that I realized during the years 2003-2009, while living and teaching in Washington, D.C.

The project in its entirety was exhibited at Schmucker Art Gallery at Gettysburg College in 2011, with a catalog and accompanying texts by Shannon Egan and Miguel de Baca. In brief, this project examines the contested legacy of race and identity from the American Civil War onward, and the sign systems that point to those fraught subjectivities and histories. It is uncanny that my initial intuition about the repressed issue of race relations before and after 9/11 was confirmed by the growing civil unrest in American cities throughout these past years. 9/11 turned the collective consciousness elsewhere, namely to a foreign invader, becoming the country’s addressee in a long, protracted war while the social fabric of American society was itself coming undone. The ongoing dispute over heritage and removal of Confederate monuments from public space highlights that the familial and cultural attachments to history are ephemeral, and subject to change with each new generation. This is the space that Meet Me at the Mason Dixon occupies. As Erika Doss wrote in a special issue of Public Art Dialogue, The Dilemma of Public Art’s Permanence, 2016, “Public art is processual, dependent on various cultural and social relationships and subject to the volatile intangibles of multiple publics and their fluctuating interests and feelings”…“Public art is not, in other words, forever.”