The Hole is proud to present a group show curated by artist and curator Tisch Abelow. In a show with a few familiar names, but many totally new to our audience, Abelow pulls from her community of emerging artists to elaborate on a sensibility she has encountered with young art-making. The work involves a problematized sense of humor and examines the relationship between irony and sincerity. The artists create provisional worlds, often in a performative way, to look at intentionality, making the viewer question “do they mean it?” and the answer being an unexpected “yes.”

The artists in Skit embrace a freedom and playfulness of self-depiction in many forms. This show explores the sentiment of coming-of-age in a sophisticated, self-conscious, and teasing way. Extravagant and sentimental, these artists incorporate elements of camp, D.I.Y., and kitsch, engaging with something illogical and whimsical.

Much like AH HOLE AH HOLE, a blog I co-run with Dakotah Savage, the work in this show is multi-layered, associative, and often self-contradictory. This antithetical mentality often leads to the creation of self-reflective environments. Ezra Tessler’s anthropomorphic figures, Nicholas Buffon’s miniatures, Savage’s puppet sets, Will Stewart’s domestic interiors – each artist explores the performative as a way to create provisional and experimental worlds.

These artists are explicitly flexible. They morph in and out of media as well as different aspects of their personalities, often using self-sabotage to their advantage. They embrace the playful and the abject as one; they play underdog to their own alpha wolf. In her video and photographic works, Laurel Nakadate positions herself in precarious situations to transform and reinvent herself. There is a similar investigation of power in Eugene Kotlyarenko’s lonely and self-deprecating video narratives; an inherent self-discovery, for one and all, in this voyeurism. -Tisch Abelow

For more information on our February exhibitions or to preview available works please email krysta@theholenyc.com