Mican Morgan manipulates relationship clichés like her sculptural materials. She pulls them apart and sticks different bits together with results that continue to be familiar yet slightly off. Nuggets of base wisdom and metaphors to love by become objects and vignettes. Getting “hitched” and braiding are scrutinized as actions of affection, but things aren’t always rosy. Expect a few bombs to drop. Cue Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield.”

Porous Walker’s artwork depicts the parts of life and relationships that make us uncomfortable or exists only in fantasy. He makes them accessible like bathroom graffiti or a note secretly passed amongst schoolboys. Indecent and hilarious, his distinct style invokes psychedelic imagery from the 70s and exists somewhere between Dr. Seuss and R. Crumb. Porous’ drawings seem like they haven’t matured past adolescence, and that is a good thing. They never should. They have a fresh wisdom to impart. Sometimes as simple as, “Don’t do this.”

Work by Ali Bailey.

The exhibition (non)Sense: Physicality, Perspective and the Consciousness of Relating will feature artwork by Joe Grimm and Erica Moore. These artists focus on the body and how and what it senses in space and time through installation artworks. Both Grimm and Moore use installation as a method of investigating the sense-able, the visible/invisible and the audible/inaudible. They question where we are, how we are, what exists and how we know it.

In Joe Grimm’s installation work he uses modified 16mm projectors, sans film and domestic standing fans to play with light, space, time, what one perceives and what actually exists. In two featured site-specific installations, Erica Moore, activates the preexisting architectural details using reflective materials. By using non-traditional hanging and installation methods, Moore plays with what happens when the viewer has to physically move their body to look at an artwork. Both artists play with physical presence, perspective, consciousness, and the relation we have to our surroundings.

Richard Hull’s new works explore spatial relationships, both metaphorically and formally, between the geometric dualities of empty and full spaces. The prevalent imagery, a biomorphic shape that resembles a horse’s tail, or when doubled and combined, a Möbius strip, or a Klein bottle*, gives viewers the visual sensation of being simultaneously located both inside and out. Reverberating concentric lines inside the primary shapes allude to movement and connectivity, and can be thought of as pathways, highways or circulatory systems. Inside these pulsating pathways are several series of dots, ellipses, concentric squares, and other diagrammatic marks that the artist thinks of as architectural, almost like apartment complexes.

Eyeball-like images crop up in several works, perhaps alluding to the artist’s partial vision in one eye. Another painting references Sisyphus and his repetitive action of pushing a boulder up a mountain, Hull’s concentric and reverberating rings make an apt visual metaphor for the energy Sisyphus expended.

The architectural details are reminiscent of Hull’s most well-known works that often depict abstracted interiors or house shapes. In this new body of work, Hull inverts his interest in interiority, sublimating it inside these coursing concentric highways embedded within biomorphic forms. Given his interest in the dialogue between empty and full spaces, Hull has now turned his painting practice almost inside out, whereas the shapes in each painting maintain this reciprocal dialogue and the body of work as whole starts a conversation with preceding works. Past works nurtured a dark and introspective mood; current paintings look out as much as they look in. Past works kept to a earth-toned palette and heavily worked surfaces; bright, directly applied high-keyed color now plays the prominent role. In Hull words, “color has become its own entity.”

* The Klein bottle is a non-orientable surface (a two-dimensional manifold) with no identifiable “inner” and “outer” sides.

In 2006, experimental filmmaker Naomi Uman retraced her great grandparents’ emigration from Eastern Europe in reverse, settling in the tiny village of Legedzine, Ukraine, where she still lives today. The result of her adventures is the quietly picaresque quintet of 16mm films, The Ukrainian Time Machine. In capturing the joys and hardships of her neighbors’ centuries-old way of life– traditions that are eroding with the encroaching pressures of modernity–Uman creates a new kind of living history, fresh with curiosity and verve. In this evening’s program, Uman will present Unnamed Film, her keen documentary about life in Legedzine, cataloging its inhabitants’ various strategies of labor and resourcefulness necessary for survival; Kalendar, a poetic collection of shots, one for each month of an entire year; and Coda, a black-and-white epilogue encapsulating the themes of the series as a whole.

There appears to be a growing return to the book amongst younger artists, writers and thinkers. This move towards the material and physical may be in reaction to the vastness and immateriality of forms of cultural production in the Second Life era. This discussion centers around definitions of the publication as art object, as curated exhibition, as micro-archive, as well as phenomenological aspects of the publication—its tactility, personable and intimate dimensions, and the unique one-to-one relationship between reader/viewer and object. Bookmakers, editors, curators and scholars have been invited to this discussion to share their experiences as we ponder the significance of recent evolutions in the book as object, curatorial challenges the artist book provokes, and the future of the medium.

Guest respondents include Brandon Alvendia, Simon Anderson, Doro Boehme, Michael Golec and Paige Johnston.

This March Pentagon presents Sara Condo and Kate Ruggeri in their very own two artists exhibition. These solo artists have decided to become a duo and pair work to create a solid visual experience. Their artwork romanticizes ideas of the mundane but brings in humor and physical emotion. Sara and Kate are not afraid to create a dialogue with sincerity, personal experience and aspects of femininity with in their artwork. Showcasing photographs, sculpture and painting this show explores different mediums in hope to create continuity with their ideas.

False Anatomies presents the diverse work of three artists dealing with the fabrication of the physical and the sometimes uncomfortable or humorous way that objecthood and illusion relate to each other. Their work commonly shifts attention to the importance of relationships between colors and textures. Paint is used as a structural element, hinting at the fiction of objects and the elusiveness of the figure, while color may be extracted entirely to highlight its indexical properties. Figures may only loosely or rarely be seen but in the case of all three artist’s work, an interest in the mystery of a kind of corpus suggests subtle overlaps.

Work by Paul Kenneth, Easton Miller and Nozomi Rose.