The Aunque
January 11 - February 16, 2013
Romer Young Gallery, SF

From the press release:

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present its third solo exhibition with Bay Area artist Amanda Curreri. Curreri transforms the gallery into The Aunque – a space of possibility, a space of the ‘even though’. With both irreverence and with earnestness, The Aunque serves as a space for reflection on power, identity, and desire in the face of the violence of contemporary social life.

Beginning with the titular language shift from English to Spanish, Curreri’s work invokes a power shift and implicates itself and the viewer in acts of “reading” and legibility. The phrase “Aunque, violencia es total” entered Curreri’s head like a mantra while on a long-distance run. Highlighting this meditative state achieved through physical and sensory experience, Curreri insists on an equivalence between body knowledge and cerebral understanding as a crucial tool of negotiating identity.

Artworks within The Aunque are a re-envisioned hand-dyed and sewn flag, multiple paintings, a video, confounding cocktail napkins, and an invitational play. The diverse languages in effect – color, form, vernacular, linguistic – all converge via poetry as a pragmatic model for this new work. Amanda offers: “I was looking for an intimate one-to-one structure for this work which is what lead me to poems. Poetry is so flagrantly about heart and commitment and also so much about the rogue and necessary pied piper figure in society. I asked a poet friend for insight on what makes something a poem, and, of course, they said that it is structure and form and then the breaking and bending of that form.” Curreri applies this formalist approach as a vehicle to push into new spaces of discourse.

On Wednesday, January 30, 7pm, Curreri hosts a performance, Jean Genet in the Aunque, which utilizes a collaged script of quotes to create a conversation of poetry and outlaws, performance of selves, and cross-identification. Pocket-knives optional.