Is You Is or Is You Ain't

Location: Creative Alliance at The Patterson
Brought To You By: Creative Alliance
Phone: 410-276-1651
Event Website: Click here
Cost: FREE!
Dates & Times:09/13/2008 - 10/25/2008 :: 05:00 PM
Description: A semi-naked woman glides through a swimming pool with a shark-fin on her head. Toy figures reenact a murder on an urban street. Estranged lovers from a French film are captured as line drawings in a shaky loop. Is You Is or Is You Ain’t is the Creative Alliance’s first major touring exhibition, seven works on video by artists of national and international significance, from Baltimore and elsewhere. Is You Is or Is You Ain’t explores the zone between play-acting and metamorphosis, a place where we go to pretend we’re something other than what we are, or to change ourselves altogether. It’s a safe place, a retreat, a place where by fictionalizing ourselves we can speak truth with something close to fearlessness. Shifting and proxy identities become both tools for liberation and defensive strategies, part of an instinctual reaction towards self-preservation in an environment of constant flux. The artists included in Is You Is or Is You Ain’t strike postures of pathos, resistance and irreverence. Winter in America, by Hank Willis Thomas in collaboration with Kambui Olujimi, uses toy figures to tell the heartbreaking, true story of a sidewalk robbery that left one man dead. Beyond the obvious irony, the story gains visceral power for being told at one remove. Similarly, Karen Yasinsky’s line drawing animation, Oh, Juliette, captures the fraught emotional space between a man and a woman in an almost-still moment from Jean Vigo’s Atalante. The transgendered cast of Kalup Linzy’s KKQueens Survey populates a call center surveying artists about their relationships, sex lives and art world habits. Mustache2, by the film collective AnC, is a satirical, ultimately poignant narrative about a cabinet salesman who advises a protégé to “find his own way” while maintaining a barely credible façade of optimism. Becoming more than herself, Simone Montemurno takes on the shark’s sleek power along with the homemade shark-fin on her head, deftly transforming the threatening into the sensuous. Laura Parnes mirrors a blissful family overlooking a pastoral landscape with wildlife footage of animals stampeding from danger to suggest how we’ve lost touch with a primal—and critical—instinct for peril. Zoë Charlton assumes the poses of famous nudes from the art historical canon flipping the vulnerability of the artists’ model to question her own place as an African American woman artist. Is You Is or Is You Ain’t was curated by Kristen Anchor and Jed Dodds (Creative Alliance), and Christopher West (Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art), with special thanks to NYC powerhouse Mari Spirito. The exhibition premiered in Indianapolis April 2008.