Odyssey and Underworld: The Art of Jerome Caja, Charles Sexton and Thomas Plageman
Odyssey and Underworld: The Art of Jerome Caja, Charles Sexton and Thomas Plageman
Show opens Sunday, June 4
Opening Reception, Sunday, June 4; 5-7:30 pm
Location: SomArts, 934 Brannan @ 8th Street
Info: Qcc
Donation
Gallery Hours: Wednesday — Sunday, June 7 — 22; Noon — 7:30 pm
Odyssey and Underworld brings together three artists who create pictorial environments wherein rituals of survival, sexuality and communion are enacted. In Charles Sexton’s monoprints and paintings, figures huddle together around primordial fires seeking deliverance from hostile gods. Thomas Plageman’s militarized landscapes depict the body’s mobilizations against political, biological and spiritual besiegement. The media in which Jerome Caja worked, including funerary ash, lead, and refuse, express the artist’s willingness to reclaim our culture’s castoffs: what is seen as valueless, soiled, exhausted of its purpose. Jerome’s imagery, likewise, directly confronts the ongoing ravagement of nature, and satirizes cultural obliviousness to and insulation from death. Through their idiosyncratic use of symbolism, myth, anthropomorphism and religious iconography, these three artists create powerful work impelled by trials of artistic and physical endurance.
