Rose Briccetti
Readymade Gallery presents Trouble in Paradise, a group exhibition featuring works by Rose Briccetti, Becky Brown, Bel Fullana, Thomas Hoffmann, Meredith Iszlai, Richard Neal, Daniel Ranalli, Jackie Reeves, Andrew Schultheis, and Tabitha Vevers. The ten artists featured in Trouble in Paradise, a mix of DNA residents and invited guests, take a deep dive into the narrative of Utopia, and discover that the facade is constantly crumbling. Climate change is certainly not a hoax: wildfires ravage Hawaii and California, glaciers are melting at alarming rates, sea levels are rising, temperatures are record-breaking, catastrophic storms increasing, warming waters changing the way the currents flow and animals (and humans) migrate.
Particular to Cape Cod (among many other tourist destinations), the promised paradise of a holiday weekend is its own kind of crisis. Family vacations buckle under the stress of living up to a picture-perfect idea of what those trips should entail. Too often fantasies of desired relaxation are wrecked by the reality of traffic, expenses, travel delays, garbage, heat, and crowds. There's evidence that families are more stressed out on vacation than at home, leading to the inevitable question: why go away at all?
The artists gathered here all comment on the unremitting consequences of ceaseless expansion without any regard for sustainability. Across Daniel Ranalli's scenes of biblical distruction, Rose Briccetti's altars to the excess of cheap plastic souveneirs, and Becky Brown's frantic depictions of climate change, each artist examines our current situation in unique ways. Whether these interventions are performative or lamenting, formalist or comedic, each piece situates the artist within the very issue that forms the theme of a piece. The surreality of some of the works on view derives less from any fictive elements collaged to them, and more from the brutal facts they document, which, without the inclusion of personalized, self-directed narratives, would unpack into inarticulate brutality.
While the concept of “immanentizing the eschaton” has been around for quite some time, in the context of Trouble in Paradise, this “eschaton” or “end of days” is dramatized as a compulsion for immediate pleasure, which, distanced and reframed by the act of creating socially engaged artworks, transmogrifies into a poetic kind of interference. Art becomes less like an image or spectacle, and more like a congealed artifact—a virtual pathway through which new approaches to understanding the complexity of our world can be preserved in a storied amber that refers back to the history of its own making.
Cape Cod’s relationship with tourism and the natural world places it at the intersection of these two “paradises”, a unique and precarious position from which artists and scientists observe these interlinked crises unfolding, like oceanview McMansions built near eroding cliffs, now available on the cheap, which soon tumble into the sea.
The show will open on August 31st, and close on September 29th.
