Boys Life
Curated by Denise Markonish, Gallery Director/Curator - Artspace, New Haven, CT
Featuring the work of artists Mark Andreas, Timothy Bailey, Stephan Jacobs, John Keefer, Andrew Mowbray, Samuel Rowlett, Huck Stoddard and Joseph Wardwell.
Boys’ Life Magazine’s
June 2004 headline story, “Duty, Honor, Country” follows a
group of Eagle Scouts on a trek to Normandy with a WWII veteran. This
patriotic duty is followed by instructions on building things, and articles
on fishing, camping safety and baseball. Looking at the works in the exhibition
Boys Life it is evident that these activities, in addition to others less
wholesome and picked up along the way, do indeed follow through from boy
to manhood. The artists in the exhibition address stereotypically male
centered hobbies, and attractions, skewing the notion of what they mean
to society by adding humor, social commentary and art historical references
to create works that are both about masculine activities as well as their
link to more generalized ideas of manhood.
The artists in this exhibition represent the never-ending quest for play
that most men continually embody, a back and forth between the boardroom
and the locker room. This sense of boyishness is exercised in a variety
of ways such as through fishing, as is the case in the works of Andrew
Mowbray and Huck Stoddard; the evolution of boy to adult games in Samuel
Rowlett’s paintings and Stephan Jacobs’s photographs; the
desire or need to fix and build things in the sculptures of Mark Andreas
and Timothy Bailey; and lastly, good old sex and rock and roll in the
paintings of John Keefer and Joseph Wardwell.
This is not the work of boy scouts anymore, rather it is the work of adult
men who, though now grown, still have that spirit of frogs, snails and
puppy dog tails within them, and know it. - Denise Markonish
