Highlighting uncertainty and contradiction, Truth or Dare emphasizes the importance of questioning both knowledge and belief by featuring artists that utilize illusion to entice, entertain, and explore the slippery terrain between fact and fiction, presence and absence, and reality and imagination. The suspension of disbelief is invoked in works that simulate games, maps, and tricks of the eye and hand—not to deceive, but to engage and connect. Today, cartography is a relic, replaced with global positioning systems that describe geography through virtual, screen-based information that appears and disappears in a keystroke. If maps have outlived their original use, what truth might they still tell? In contemporary art, maps, along with books and other printed texts, remain potent sources of inspiration for exploring the intersections of knowledge and fantasy, and of experience and imagination.
Facing continuing global strife, political instability, and economic disparity, the artworks featured in Truth or Dare speak truth to power through unconventional, often playful juxtapositions of imagery and materials, asking viewers to look and think—and question—twice. At a time when alternate facts equate to misrepresentations of truth, the alternate fictions of art may speak more honest, deeper truths. The alternative reality of the 21st-century artist’s imaginative universe may offer the ideal arena in which to confront the present and envision the future.
Featured Artists: Slater Bradley, Nick Brandt, Sebastiaan Bremer, Alain Declercq, Adonis Flores, Anthony Goicolea, Luis Gonzalez Palma, Ann Hamilton, Miler Lagos, Yousseff Nabil, Paolo Ventura, Federico Somi
Also on view – Spotlight: LaToya Ruby Frazier
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s haunting and evocative photographs document the people, places, and politics that have shaped her life and her art. Frazier’s hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, located just outside of Pittsburgh, is both the source and subject of her best-known body of work, The Notion of Family; four works from this series are presented here. Within the domestic settings of living rooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms, Frazier’s images of her mother Cynthia, her grandmother Ruby, and the young JC, as well as of herself, illuminate both the intimacy between them and their struggles with economic insecurity and chronic disease—struggles shared by the broader community of Braddock and beyond.
This presentation of photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier is the inaugural Spotlightexhibition, a new 21c initiative that focuses on a single artist making time-based work. Frazier’s work was selected for Spotlight because her photographs embody and express the theme of FotoFocus 2018, Open Archive. Documenting personal and public experience, Frazier’s practice expands the notion of an archive to include family narrative, social commentary, political critique, and aesthetic innovation.
