What We Loved Was Not Enough

Amna Asghar, Michael Dotson, Levan Mindiashvili, Jen Schoonmaker

Curated by Super Dutchess

May 6- May 26, 2018

Installation view of What We Loved Was Not Enough. Amna Asghar, Michael Dotson, Levan Mindiashvili, Jen Schoonmaker — Installation view of *What We Loved Was Not Enough*. Amna Asghar, Michael Dotson, Levan Mindiashvili, Jen Schoonmaker

Press Release

When we go back in our minds, way back, we find that we are capable of processing memories through our childhood selves. Recapturing these thoughts as they were before we became responsible animals, we connect to an essence that was coming into being. That essence was largely uncomplicated by external socio-political factors, and was, if we dare fantasize, not self-conscious.

At some point as we got older, outside forces began to act upon us, showing us images of who we could be. Those forces suggested how to construct an identity through our relations to other people and material things. Memories from that point gain a sense of the outside world, and we remember those events through an array of lenses. Some of those lenses dampen the spirit, creating blurry images of self, caricatures of us.

But we also collected filters in the light of outside forces that made us grow. They allowed us to share experiences linked by visual language, and delighted us by the realization that all of a sudden shared environments could alter how we experience taste, touch, music.

The artists in What We Loved Was Not Enough have drawn from the language of communal experiences, some imposed and some welcomed, and re-personalized them through fragments and compartments, throwing them back into the world as images and sculptures. In Michael Dotson’s work, the vastly influential graphic world of Walt Disney is sliced up and left dripping, playing with our sense of what we think we see in the painting vs. what we actually see. Levan Mindiashvili’s work also moves with this kind of liquidity, looking at the shifting realm between public the private through a language of designed objects, furnishings, and other intimate, domestic items. Jen Schoonmaker’s Polyphonic Series are built through accumulated images that create new spaces through layers of information. Amna Asghar confronts identities imposed upon us through advertising, printed matter and ephemera, segmenting these images with her own narrative.