Atlas

Atlas: Anne-Lise Coste, Imani Ford, Sydney King, Lara Konrad, Mamiko Otsubo, Sinéad Spelman, Paula Stuttman

The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present Atlas, a group exhibition of serial works on paper about the body.
 
When Marcel Broodthaers died at the relatively young age of 52, he left many unfinished artworks, texts, and ideas. Thus, in the spirit of learning by making things, the Broodthaers Society will mount a series of periodic exhibitions that pick up on such threads as “the amateur,” “the transformation of art into merchandise,” and “laziness.”
 
Atlas is the first of these exhibitions. Inspired by Broodthaers’ The Conquest of Space: Atlas for use by artists and the military (1975), the show will reconsider the character, theme, and gender of Atlas, the mythic titan tasked with supporting heaven and earth for eternity by the Greek gods.

Participating artists are: Anne-Lise Coste (Orthoux, France), Imani Ford (New York), Sydney King (Brooklyn), Lara Konrad (New York), Mamiko Otsubo (Los Angeles), Sinéad Spelman (Barcelona), and Paula Stuttman (New York). Their works on paper—by degrees cool, expressive, meticulous, sardonic, and wild—have all been encountered serendipitously over the past year. As a group, they share an approach to art-making that is rooted in self-inquiry and its relationship to cosmopolitanism. Although modest in format, the artworks in toto speak to the wisdom that can accrue from a dedicated serial practice.

In relation to Atlas, the artworks are more concerned with the perseverance of the body than with symbolic conquests carried out in one’s name. As such they can be seen as being more focused on the prosaic pressure that Atlas endures than on its transliteration into heroic deeds. They suggest both the timeframe of Atlas’ task and the productive potential of making one thing after another.

Atlas will open at MBnb on Sunday, January 19, from 3–6pm, and will continue through Saturday, March 7. Gallery hours are Fridays and Saturdays, 1–6pm and by appointment.

MBnb is a project space that operates under the aegis of the Broodthaers Society of America, New York. It was conceived, in part, to explore what it might mean “to sell something and succeed in life” in what is euphemistically referred to as the sharing economy, 50 years after Broodthaers uttered those doomed, aspirational words.