IT’S YOUR PARTY: ELECTION 2016
Inspired by Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead, MOCAD has embarked on a multi-year examination of artists who seek to create participatory and socially transformative art. Known primarily as social practice, its practitioners freely blur the lines among art making, performance, political activism, community organizing, environmentalism, and investigative journalism, creating a deeply participatory art form.
PAST EXHIBITIONS
IT’S YOUR PARTY: ELECTION 2016
SEPTEMBER 9, 2016 – JANUARY 1, 2017
MIKE KELLEY’S MOBILE HOMESTEAD
Don’t Swap Horses in the Middle of the Stream, In your Heart you Know He’s Right, and Not Just Peanuts. Are these titles of country songs or campaign slogans? If you guessed campaign slogans you’re correct! But who won these elections and who lost? Find out this fall when we celebrate the winners and losers alike with It’s Your Party, an exhibition of presidential campaign memorabilia drawn from the vast collection of Morry “The Button Man” Greener. Campaign posters, bumper stickers, pennants, and other ephemera from elections past and present will fill the Mobile Homestead. In the garage we’ll be screening election related films and historical debates and broadcasting the live coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign. Join us for debate and election night parties where you are welcome to commiserate or celebrate with your friends and neighbors.
Inspired by Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead, MOCAD has embarked on a multi-year examination of artists who seek to create participatory and socially transformative art. Known primarily as social practice, its practitioners freely blur the lines among art making, performance, political activism, community organizing, environmentalism, and investigative journalism, creating a deeply participatory art form.
The presentation of Jonathan Horowitz’s Hillary Clinton is a Person Too (2008) comes in anticipation of the 2016 presidential election, similar to its preliminary reveal in the artist’s 2008 solo exhibition at Gavin Brown’s enterprise (Obama ’08). Inspired by a 1970’s Mother’s Day figurine, Horowitz crafted his own version as a nod to Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy.
While politically ambiguous, the sculpture pushes viewers to question many of the issues to-day’s presidential candidates face; for example, this election’s overt sexism. The presence of gender bias in our culture has brought us to a crossroads this election: Hillary Clinton has again become a figure both vilified and championed by the electorate. Where does this leave us?
Jonathan Horowitz makes art that combines the imagery and ambivalence of Pop art with the engaged criticality of conceptualism. Often based in both popular commercial and art historical sources, his work in video, sculpture, painting and photography examines the deep-seated links between consumerism and political consciousness, as well as the political silences of postwar art. Recent painting projects have explored the personal psy-chology of mark making, at times, prominently employing the hands of others. Solo exhibitions include Occupy Greenwich (Brant Foundation, 2016); Your Land/My Land: Election ’12, pre-sented concurrently at seven museums across the US (from the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles to the New Museum, New York, 2012); Minimalist Works from the Holocaust Museum (Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland, 2010-11); Apocalypto Now (Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2009); and the retrospective exhibition, And/Or, (P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 2009). Horowitz lives and works in New York.
