PRESENT TENSE

PRESENT TENSE

Exhibition Details

Namwon Choi, Katherine Sandoz, Todd Schroeder, Marcus Kenney, Ansley West Rivers, Will Penny, and Betsy Cain

April 9 - June 18

Click here to view the full exhibition online on Artsy.

Laney Contemporary is pleased to announce our first ever online exhibition entitled Present Tense, a group show organized by artist Gonzalo Hernandez featuring seven of our represented artists. Formal and conceptual considerations inform this selection of painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture. Single words, familiar phrases, internal and external landscapes, are all taking on new meanings under our tense, present conditions of relative confinement. 

Even the phrase Present Tense, which normally indicates an action verb or suggests an action that is currently happening and ongoing or habitually performed, begins to take on new meaning: what does it mean to be present in our new circumstances as global time and action adjusts? Our landscapes either shrink into our own backyard or terrace, if we even have one, or slow down as the present becomes localized. New meaning also arises as this is perhaps the most tense present that any of us, in two generations, has yet endured. Present Tense, as such, collects works that explore both contracting and expanding understandings of landscape and language. It touches on the abstraction of and redefinition of what self and other mean within these newly defined limits. It explores questions such as: in our new limitations are we, ironically, finding possibilities for expansion? Present Tense calls our attention to the presence of detail and to the importance and constancy of creativity. 

This exhibition, responsive to our current conditions, suggests new ways for us to come together for viewing and conversation. It offers a selection of art works in a virtual space, into which a larger audience can enter, providing focus and ideas about how to inhabit space and time differently. In short, this exhibition looks at how familiar words and worlds can expand and contract, dramatically re-defined with shifting daily perspectives.

View the checklist here.