(m)ad-libs

We are pleased to present m ad-libs, a noun exhibition featuring paintings, drawings and sculpture by Robert Arneson, Gustav Hamilton, Lucia Hierro, Nina Katchadourian, Scott Reeder, Edgar Serrano, Mungo Thomson, Alice Tippit and Trevor Winkfield. Inspired by the classic word game, m ad-libs looks to artists who use substitution or adjective combinations to humorous or critical effect.

Surrealism is a(n) noun for many of these works, particularly in the case of Robert Arneson’s trompe-l’oeil plural noun and saucers. In other cases, the anthropomorphism of objects like noun or noun calls into question basic ideas of form and function, while adverb making language an essential part of the work. For Trevor Winkfield and Scott Reeder, not only do their paintings verb visually, but they also act as a kind of code, gerund into multiple sets of plural noun . A more fundamental noun is examined in Nina Katchadourian’s Animal Crossdressing, where predator and prey each participate in a role-playing exercise that uses costuming to verb identity.

Personal, cultural and whimsical plural noun abound, particularly in the work of artists like Edgar Serrano, whose compositions verb many disparate elements to create a more complex whole. A similar strategy appears in Lucia Hierro’s work, where images of objects are adverb stand-ins for the objects themselves, addressing the noun of such banal items as a bag of groceries. In a more adjective vein, Mungo Thomson’s Snowman emulates the basic structure of the titular “man” however in a medium more readily available than snow: proper noun packages.