EI TOI, BENOIT?
JEANETTE MUNDT
BEN SAKOGUCHI
ABED ELMAJID SHALABI
JEANETTE MUNDT
BEN SAKOGUCHI
ABED ELMAJID SHALABI
SATURDAY
OCTOBER 28
2023
OCTOBER 28
2023
SATURDAY
DECEMBER 02
2023
DECEMBER 02
2023
SARA’S is pleased to present Et toi, Benoit?, a three person exhibition featuring the work of Jeanette Mundt, Ben Sakoguchi and Abed Elmajid Shalabi, on view from October 28 to December 2, 2023.
The paintings and sculptures in Et toi, Benoit? play on the activities of visual language: the humor and fallibility of those signs and symbols that point to one signification or another, and their ever breathing, evolving role in cultural memory. The works sing stories in different octaves—at times they writhe and emote, bursting with some essential meaning that somewhere along the way got too tangled up in translation to make perfect sense. But still, the viewer is invited into the conversation, to pick at the threads, disconnect and connect, until some common signal starts to become clear.
Ben Sakoguchi’s Orange Crate Label paintings explore how images operate commercially, layering symbols and signs into tightly framed pictures that mimic the labels used to package and sell oranges in the Southern California of his youth. His densely populated compositions re-contextualize and repurpose these signs, creating fictional consumer content, at once nostalgic and critical, and often in direct relation to cultural artifacts and autobiographical events. They are hyper referential to the point of oversaturated illegibility, not unlike the wry formatting of image and text in online spaces—the other commercial frontier.
Working on a broader scale, Jeanette Mundt’s paintings pull away at the legibility of the image until only formal tangles of reference remain—leaving the viewer with a sense of the emotive and uncanny. Working from images ranging from the personal to commercial, internet-found to self crafted, she seeks to question, in an era of so much aesthetic information, whether visual language can still reliably transmit meaning, or is our own, in-the-moment internal translation the only one that can be considered real. When cultural connotation and interpretation so rapidly change, what linguistic formats can we trust?
The paintings and sculptures in Et toi, Benoit? play on the activities of visual language: the humor and fallibility of those signs and symbols that point to one signification or another, and their ever breathing, evolving role in cultural memory. The works sing stories in different octaves—at times they writhe and emote, bursting with some essential meaning that somewhere along the way got too tangled up in translation to make perfect sense. But still, the viewer is invited into the conversation, to pick at the threads, disconnect and connect, until some common signal starts to become clear.
Ben Sakoguchi’s Orange Crate Label paintings explore how images operate commercially, layering symbols and signs into tightly framed pictures that mimic the labels used to package and sell oranges in the Southern California of his youth. His densely populated compositions re-contextualize and repurpose these signs, creating fictional consumer content, at once nostalgic and critical, and often in direct relation to cultural artifacts and autobiographical events. They are hyper referential to the point of oversaturated illegibility, not unlike the wry formatting of image and text in online spaces—the other commercial frontier.
Working on a broader scale, Jeanette Mundt’s paintings pull away at the legibility of the image until only formal tangles of reference remain—leaving the viewer with a sense of the emotive and uncanny. Working from images ranging from the personal to commercial, internet-found to self crafted, she seeks to question, in an era of so much aesthetic information, whether visual language can still reliably transmit meaning, or is our own, in-the-moment internal translation the only one that can be considered real. When cultural connotation and interpretation so rapidly change, what linguistic formats can we trust?
Abed Elmajid Shalabi’s sculptures gesture at an era of promise in Middle Eastern social history. Using visual markers of the region’s failed 20th century modernization project—items like Western safety equipment for luxury vehicles and anti-shock mats for industrial kitchens, his sculptures double as metaphors for body armor. Working from a personal lineage of queerness, blue-collar labor and military unrest, Shalabi’s concerns are with the dynamic between coverage and exposure, of vulnerability and power. The objects he chooses to cast in the delicate material of glazed ceramic are mass-produced and represent a “loss of locality,” affording them an unconscious reference point in each individual viewer as well as a ubiquitous banality. This dichotomy allows them to slip past a fixed political interpretation and speak to the larger psychosocial importance that mass-manufactured objects, inevitably time-and-place-specific, have in reflecting a cultural ethos. Shalabi revels in the weightlessness of the flaccid consumer artifact, funny and sad in the absence of the idea it represents—in this case, protection and progress.
BEN SAKOGUCHI (b. 1938, San Bernardino, CA) lives and works in Pasadena. His work has been featured in institutional surveys and group exhibitions including L.A. RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945–1980, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena (2012), Sub-Pop, Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011), Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2000), and The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s, The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, and The Studio Museum, New York (1990). He was twice awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts.
BEN SAKOGUCHI (b. 1938, San Bernardino, CA) lives and works in Pasadena. His work has been featured in institutional surveys and group exhibitions including L.A. RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945–1980, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena (2012), Sub-Pop, Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011), Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2000), and The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s, The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, and The Studio Museum, New York (1990). He was twice awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts.
ABED ELMAJID SHALABI (b.1991, Palestine/Israel) lives and works in Richmond, Virginia. Shalabi investigates how technological objects construct emotional and cultural shifts and alter our connection to our body, gender, and self. His installations link homophobia, shame and sexual dissatisfaction to the colonial power structure that reinforces such dynamics and produces them. Select recent exhibitions include Conflicted, C24 Gallery, New York (2023), Shadow-work, NARS Foundation Gallery, New York, NY (2023) and Common Thread, Visual Arts Center, Richond, VA (2022). Shalabi has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including VCCA’s 50th anniversary fellowship for artists of color (2023), Hamiltonian Artist Fellowship Washington DC (2023-2024), The Robert Weil Family Foundation Scholarship (2021), and The Paul F. Miller Graduate Scholarship in Sculpture, VCUarts (2020).
JEANETTE MUNDT (b. 1981, Princeton, New Jersey) lives and works in New York, NY. Solo exhibitions include those at Company Gallery, New York; Overduin & Co., Los An-geles; Red Tracy, Copenhagen; Société, Berlin; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Bridget Donahue, New York; Off Vendome, New York; and Green Gallery, Milwaukee. Mundt’s work has also been included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial as well as group ex-hibitions organized by David Zwirner, New York; Kaufmann Repetto, New York and Mi-lan; G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, Germany; Greene Naftali, New York; Galerie Neu, Berlin; and Peter Freeman, Inc., New York. Her work is included in multiple public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon; Kistefos Museum, Norway; and the Museum Ludwig, Germany. Mundt currently lives and works in New York, NY.
JEANETTE MUNDT (b. 1981, Princeton, New Jersey) lives and works in New York, NY. Solo exhibitions include those at Company Gallery, New York; Overduin & Co., Los An-geles; Red Tracy, Copenhagen; Société, Berlin; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Bridget Donahue, New York; Off Vendome, New York; and Green Gallery, Milwaukee. Mundt’s work has also been included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial as well as group ex-hibitions organized by David Zwirner, New York; Kaufmann Repetto, New York and Mi-lan; G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, Germany; Greene Naftali, New York; Galerie Neu, Berlin; and Peter Freeman, Inc., New York. Her work is included in multiple public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon; Kistefos Museum, Norway; and the Museum Ludwig, Germany. Mundt currently lives and works in New York, NY.
OPENING EVENT
FLORIDA, MAN
SEAN J. PATRICK CARNEY
SEAN J. PATRICK CARNEY
WITH A SONIC AND
VISUAL LECTURE BY
SEAN J. PATRICK CARNEY
FEATURING READINGS BY
ELVIA WILK
AND PETER BD
VISUAL LECTURE BY
SEAN J. PATRICK CARNEY
FEATURING READINGS BY
ELVIA WILK
AND PETER BD
OPENING
RECEPTION
SATURDAY
OCTOBER 28 2023
5:30 PM
SATURDAY
OCTOBER 28 2023
5:30 PM
Sean J Patrick Carney presents
FLORIDA, MAN, a sonic talk about the Sunshine State, sunken continents, speculative fiction, hurricanes, mirror-travel, Robert Smithson, floodplain hammocks, land bridges, theosophy, New Jersey, white pickup trucks, enantiomorphs, Area X, and the granola-reactionary singularity.
FLORIDA, MAN, a sonic talk about the Sunshine State, sunken continents, speculative fiction, hurricanes, mirror-travel, Robert Smithson, floodplain hammocks, land bridges, theosophy, New Jersey, white pickup trucks, enantiomorphs, Area X, and the granola-reactionary singularity.
SARA'S
2 EAST BROADWAY, FLOOR 3
NEW YORK, NY. 10038
SARA’S is wheelchair accessible.
2 EAST BROADWAY, FLOOR 3
NEW YORK, NY. 10038
SARA’S is wheelchair accessible.
Robert Smithson. Hypothetical Continent in Shells: Lemuria, 1969. Four 126 format chromogenic slides. Collection: Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.