↳ Exhibitions

Georgia Gardner Gray at Croy Nielsen

March 7, 2019

Artist: Georgia Gardner Gray

Exhibition title: Buddha Bless this Show

Venue: Croy Nielsen, Vienna, Austria

Date: January 26 – March 9, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Croy Nielsen

BUDDHA BLESS THIS SHOW

Guards watch over our many blessings, burning penal calories to protect this blessed culture.
Wet with sweat, horny isolation begs for an immaculate conception.
Buddha does not do those ‘grown up things’.
Buddha’s chubby lips flit in silence as he chants his prayer, relentless like a bot.
Buddha is never ending, his belly outweighs culture.

BUDDHA BLESS THIS SHOW

Trapped in zoos, animals are well acquainted with the feeling of performing themselves. Each type of animal organized into cells, seperated and classified, the animal laid bare for consumption: letting us see what distinguishes us from them.

What ties us all together, ‘human’ and ‘animal’ is the necessity to have sex. While amoebas and some protozoans can asexually reproduce, humans need two distinct DNA sets to procreate. It becomes more and more difficult for humans to accomplish this task, as a strange phenomena takes shape in the shadows of human history. While our consciousnesses continue to expand through the millenia, our genitals seem to become dumb, dysfunctional. In direct proportion, the pressing need to continue the human race at all becomes doubtful. And so a new subject appears intent only on the replication of herself. No longer attached to the social norms of sexual reproduction, her asexual labour goes to her self-expansion, her artistry, her empowerment. Outsourced to the sex app Tinder, ‘Single lebt wie Single will’ (Single lives as single wants) — her sex takes on avant-garde poses: liberated from the chastity belt of social ties, now she’s into anal.

In a painting the ambiguity of a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ object is displayed, an “artifice, an ideal, a ‘beyond’ that my psyche produces in order to take up a position outside myself–ek-stasis (ecstasy).”1 In these paintings, humans sweat, unable to keep up with the pace of asexual reproduction. Blank in their toned, consensual poses; their faces are stoney, unaroused, shame and resentment building around them. Like Mantegne’s Dead Christ, a person lies alone, in a cold sacrificial sweat, nails dug into a voodoo doll. While those outside the plight of this ‘humanity’, take their simple pleasure at the Christ-mas Market.

^{1 ‘}Beauty: the Depressive Other’s Realm, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia’, Julia Kristeva

BUDDHA BLESS THIS SHOW

Georgia Gardner Gray (b. 1988 in New York, lives and works in Berlin) studied at Cooper Union, NY. She was awarded the Lingen Art Prize and had a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Lingen (2018). Further institutional solo exhibitions include Precious Provincials at Kunstverein in Hamburg and Concorde at UKS in Oslo (2017). In 2018 Croy Nielsen presented her work in the Statements section of Art Basel. Her theatre play Concorde: Saturn Returns was recently staged at Grüner Salon, Volksbühne (2018), and her work has been included in group exhibitions at Braunsfelder Family Collection, Cologne (2018), Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2017), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015).