“Collecting can come very close to what is involved in the making of art. The assemblage of disparate elements into a totality evokes the satisfying metaphors of wholeness and unity, and the containment or display of what is valuable involves the very same questions of form and function that any artist must ask.”
—William Davies King, Collections of Nothing
Tick-tock, tick-tock… Losing all sense of time, lost in the minutiae, sorting and classifying, discovering new details, our eyes become blurry as another hour passes. One could call this a compulsion, but we instead call it a collection. It manifests in a rumpled baggie full of deeply creased magazine clippings, or a drawer overflowing with 1981 pennies, or an accumulation of images tucked inconspicuously into a desktop folder. Sometimes, it is a thing made. Sometimes, it is a thing found. Sometimes, it is nothing more than a set of memories replayed again and again in the mind, so as not to forget. A collection is an indulgence but it is also a necessity.
While we now take for granted the centrality of collecting as a human behavior, conversations about “collecting” in the gallery context were once most closely associated with connoisseurship and relegated to the affluent. Now, living in a world of digital connectedness, and the endless sub-cultures and information streams it enables, society at-large is prepared to approach cultural production through collection-centric understanding of the world. High and low culture can now blend in unexpected ways, and the artists of Hidden Hour demonstrate the multitude of ways the collector-mindset can both inform the production of artwork, and how to engage with an audience adept as collectors.
This exhibition features seven artists whose work invokes various notions of “collecting.” Adam Milner scours the world around him for discarded or obscure objects to define aspects of identity and relationships. Craig Drennen, who, for the past decade, created artworks based on characters from the critically panned 1984 film Supergirl and Shakespeare’s obscure play Timon of Athens, has acquired a roster of players that can be called upon for any performance. Pam Lins, who is known for interdisciplinary work that addresses how history can be synthesized to convey emotion, presents a collection of crying eyes she has been making weekly since Donald Trump has taken office. Both Rubens Ghenov and Nicole Cherubini focus on the past as a vehicle to explore how we determine value in both everyday objects and those with cultural significance. The drawings of Amy Pleasant seek to document the uniqueness, as well as the commonality, found within the human form. Lastly, the motifs found within Shai Yehezkelli’s paintings—figures, plants, pots— help solidify our desire for the domestic to preserve elements of our h
