The Armory Show
March 7 – March 10, 2019
For The Armory Show Galleries Section, David Castillo Gallery presents works in sculpture, painting and photography by Sanford Biggers, Maria de los Angeles Rodriguez Jimenez, Lyle Ashton Harris, Pepe Mar, Xaviera Simmons, Shinique Smith, and Vaughn Spann. Conceptually, the booth is invigorated by the trope of Benjamin’s flâneur, and Benedict Anderson’s concept of an imagined community; reprised tools for reordering, historicizing, provoking and destroying how individuals and groups understand and know in the twenty-first century. In the proposed works, flânerie is redefined by a radical accountability, association and kinship, responding to the urgent call of our times.
Sanford Biggers traverses and flattens history, amalgamating references across time with little regard for its linear trajectory. The gallery will present new sculpture works by Biggers. Lyle Ashton Harris Harris’ flânerie is evidenced in nostalgia, surveying his own past across this prolific undertaking of visible memory. At the Armory Show we will present new photography works.
Pepe Mar works from a tribal iconography that references his native Mexico, all tribal cultures, and also none. The gallery will present new collage paintings. Xaviera Simmons is an artist who is a traveler, likening disparate cultural legacies and obscuring the lines between here and there, us and them. At The Armory Show the gallery will present her latest iteration of photographs of characters in landscapes.
Together, there is an ambling to the artists in this proposal, where they digress and progress along formal threads of meaning, image and language to articulate a new kind of urgent and responsive representation for today.