Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream
05 Sep - 05 Oct 2013
SOME DREAMERS OF THE GOLDEN DREAM
5 September - 5 October 2013
Greene Naftali is pleased to present Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream. The exhibition takes its title from Joan Didion’s 1966 essay about double-indemnity in the San Bernadino Valley, the “last stop for all those who came from somewhere else.”
This cross-generational exhibition—featuring works by Ed Ruscha, Alex Israel, Alex Hubbard, Julie Becker, Lutz Bacher, and Rachel Harrison—attempts to shine a light on the dark underside of the sphinx-like term Dreamer. Works include the New York debut of Ed Ruscha’s Psycho Spaghetti Western series; paintings by West-Coast artist Alex Hubbard, sodden with color and hanging on the brink of collapse; the vast, eerily empty skyscapes of L.A.-based Alex Israel; conceptualist Julie Becker’s menacing interiors, depicted in unflinching, paranoid detail; sculptures by Rachel Harrison, which conjure at once a prehistoric American past and a deserted American future; and the gallery’s first collaboration with Lutz Bacher, which coincides with the artist’s moving – after four decades – away from California.
“This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.”
-Excerpt from Joan Didion’s 1966 essay, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream
5 September - 5 October 2013
Greene Naftali is pleased to present Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream. The exhibition takes its title from Joan Didion’s 1966 essay about double-indemnity in the San Bernadino Valley, the “last stop for all those who came from somewhere else.”
This cross-generational exhibition—featuring works by Ed Ruscha, Alex Israel, Alex Hubbard, Julie Becker, Lutz Bacher, and Rachel Harrison—attempts to shine a light on the dark underside of the sphinx-like term Dreamer. Works include the New York debut of Ed Ruscha’s Psycho Spaghetti Western series; paintings by West-Coast artist Alex Hubbard, sodden with color and hanging on the brink of collapse; the vast, eerily empty skyscapes of L.A.-based Alex Israel; conceptualist Julie Becker’s menacing interiors, depicted in unflinching, paranoid detail; sculptures by Rachel Harrison, which conjure at once a prehistoric American past and a deserted American future; and the gallery’s first collaboration with Lutz Bacher, which coincides with the artist’s moving – after four decades – away from California.
“This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.”
-Excerpt from Joan Didion’s 1966 essay, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream