Given the sobering adjustments one might expect following the world financial collapse, several weeks ago, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott posed the question ‘What kind of movies do we need now?’ His answer? What the people really need is… neo-realism.… Neo realist films, like other forms of realist art and literature, gain a sense of expository justice in showing ordinary, often boring, deviant or sometimes abject images…”
For this exhibition, Benedict and LaBier have created a series of works that depict the mundane views, and objects of our everyday lives. In his extended exhibition text, Afterimages of the Everyday, Tom McGrath describes one of the title works, Microscope by saying, “…It’s been a long time since science moved beyond what can be seen with the naked eye, and sometimes it feels like the artist got left behind in his studio with his brushes and a lousy microscope.”
In art, the desire to turn toward something like “realism” in painting might have less to do with reality, and more to do with resolving some very abstract problems in the everyday. Citygarden and Microscope will be on view at Gallery Diet from May 9th – June 6th,2009 and will be accompanied by an extensive text written by Tom McGrath from which the quotes for this press release were taken.
