In a culture obsessed with selfies, Ghosts 3 is a show that honors the portrait and investigates (merely touching upon on), the infinite possibilities of how to represent the face. The show includes visual pieces, written words, and performances at the opening and/or closing by a collection of eclectic musicians creating unique sounds. Originally conceived and titled by Abby Shahn, Ghosts refers to the concept that every graven image of a person is actually a specter. Regarding the face Shahn writes, “An almost magical transformation occurs when a line becomes an image. It changes its meaning and its function. Whereas, before, it lay on the surface of the paper, now it delineates a form and exists in an imaginary space.”
ARTISTS
Abby Shahn
James Fangboner
Juliet Karelsen
Wally Warren
Barbara Sullivan
Abbeth Russell
Martha Miller
Maggie Libby
Alan Crichton
Susan Bickford
James Elkins in his book The Object Stares Back writes “A face is also like a machine, one that produces effects peculiar to itself that no other machine can make. All faces, I could say, are examples of a single kind of a machine – what the philosophers Gilles and Deleuze and Felix Guattari call ‘the abstract machine of faciality.’ Ultimately it’s very simple: a blank surface punctured by apertures. The ‘white wall’ and ‘black holes’ of the face form a system, a machinelike collaboration, that produces the effects we think of as faces.” Comprised of artists who represent faces in a variety of media (painting, three dimensional fresco, photography, collage, and sculpture), Ghosts 3 includes some of the artists who showed in Ghosts 1&2 and some new additions. Some of the work is bold, colorful, and multiple, while other work is small and intimate.
The Artists of Ghosts 3James Fangboner with his Mixed Media piecesWally Warren
Susan Bickford’s Collaborative Michael Jackson PortraitAbby Shahn Stingy BrimSusan Bickford (Detail)Martha Miller Twenty-OneMartha Miller At the TableMartha Miller Annunciation
Alan CrichtonJuliet Karelsen (Detail)Juliet KarelsenAbbeth Russel
