The Comic Uncanny

The Comic Uncanny

May 22^nd – July 27^th, 2007

SHAHEEN is delighted to announce The Comic Uncanny, a group exhibition that will include paintings and works on paper by Marcel Dzama, Matthew Fisher, David Godbold, John Jodzio, Scooter Laforge, Christopher Moss, Raymond Pettibon, David Shrigley, Ryan Steadman, and H.C. Westermann.   The exhibition has been organized by New York based curator and art historian Stephanie Theodore.

“The Comic Uncanny” curator Stephanie Theodore has commented on the exhibition as follows:

Questions of identity and self-definition have been an important part of contemporary art for decades.  Artists examine themselves and their place in society and art history with the utmost gravity.  While the artists in The Comic Uncanny reflect upon the world around them and their interactions therewith, they all employ, by one means or another, a methodological approach to art making that deflates, detournes and lampoons the expected experience of a work of art.  Using the self as a starting point, the work in this exhibition makes the artist the butt of its own joke, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, often pushing acceptable limits of taste and accepted ideas of what art is supposed to be.  Crude materiality, odd subject matter, and a healthy disrespect for propriety have a jarring effect, and the uncanny response to inappropriate humor -- a slightly embarrassed laugh, a suppressed giggle, a quick guffaw is the slightly naughty pleasure of the work in this exhibition.