The Mirror (2024, acrylic on canvas over wood panel wood cutout, 22×16”) by Arghavan Khosravi
by: Rebecca M. Alvin
Artist and curator Matt Bollinger conceived of Edge Condition, a summer-long exhibition at the Fine Arts Work Center’s Hudson D. Walker Gallery that travels to the Armory Show in New York in September, with a broad notion of the word “edge.” A past visual arts fellow at FAWC, Bollinger cites Provincetown itself as an inspiration in his curatorial statement; we live out here on what seems like the edge of the Earth sometimes. And so he’s pulled together works that exemplify the idea of being on the edge, revealing edges, concealing edges, and everything in between in a group show of 19 of his colleagues—all former FAWC visual arts fellows, including Herman Aguirre, Ellen Akimoto, Taylor Baldwin, Amy Brener, Angela Dufresne, Elizabeth Flood, Heidi Hahn, Ezra Johnson, Arghavan Khosravi, Sam Messer, Simonette Quamina, Anne Clare Rogers, Alexandria Smith, James Everett Stanley, Agnes Walden, Chuck Webster, Phil Whitman, Lisa Yuskavage, and Bollinger himself.
The styles, mediums, and approaches are diverse. For example, in Ezra Johnson’s two 2023 paintings on paper, Paper and Sketchbooks Stack 1 and Paper and Sketchbooks Stack 2, the hard-lined edges of the rectangular sketchbooks are an obvious indication of the show’s theme. But Lisa Yuskavage’s lithograph Hippies (2018) is not quite so clearly edged. Likewise, James Stanley’s Dreaming Child (2023) is an oil painting of a young girl with braids, with the tightly combed hairstyle evidence of edges, while Taylor Baldwin’s creepy sculpture made of “4 years of chewed double mint gum, copper tubing and mixed media” evokes edges in the ways in which it mixes media to create something like a bust, but with the tubing calling the idea of binding and chains to mind.
The themes and subject matter in these works are also distinct from one another, whether it’s Liz Flood’s Dunes (March, West), Arghavan Khosravi’s surrealist eye in The Mirror, or the abstract assemblage Weathervane by Anne Clare Rogers, which is made of human hair, paper, glue, latex, and poplar and suggests an appendage, which can appear alternately as a finger, a leg, or perhaps a phallic symbol. All of the works combine to provoke our own visceral responses—you might say, our own edges, as we grapple with meaning, emotion, and intellectual stimulation. It’s not to say the show “has something for everyone,” but it is likely if you are interested in contemporary art, you will respond to something here, because there are so many avenues of exploration, it’s bound to inspire thought and reflection.
Edge Condition is on view at the Hudson D. Walker Gallery of the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC), 24 Pearl St., Provincetown, through August 23. Works are also available for sale on artsy.net with a portion of the proceeds going to support FAWC’s fellowship program. For more information, call 508.487.9960 or visit fawc.org.
