Loaded Objects at Spring/Break Art Show

February 16 - February 20th, 2022

Work by Sasha Filimonov
Curated by Pietro Alexander

PRESS RELEASE

Art is an object with stakes. When the Art object transcends material boundaries, it’s physical presence impacts the psychological, spiritual and political realm. Art today doesn’t have stakes. The object in contemporary art, whether it’s painting (name painter) or sculpture (Damien Hirst’s salty semen), is an empty thing. A vessel that is engaged with to identify social and cultural boundaries. In signaling towards it’s context, contemporary art is paralyzed by it’s own self awareness. Art, robbed of it’s objecthood, has become a simulacrum for its audience to identify with. A language with which the art world reacts to the world of everything else.

That is to say in so many words that contemporary art is discourse, and by nature of it’s context, it is discourse without action. These guns are art with consequence, a return to the object that stands alone and speaks for itself. They emulate the form of the firearm without it’s utility, viscerally confronting the viewer with its power and embodying, with totality, the consequence of it’s existence and its grip on America.