BELLWETHER is proud to present the work of John Bauer and Diana Puntar.
"Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege". - Dave Hickey
Diana Puntar makes hybrid sculptures that hover between functional object, minimal art and suburban schlock. Think Judd meets Ikea. Her work borrows from the familiar environs of suburban design and mass-produced furniture. Her attraction to materials that American culture has proliferated: wood paneling, Formica, vinyl and other synthetic products that mimic the "real" yet promise to be more cost effective and to wipe clean with a damp sponge. So many of these synthetics are cheap stand-ins for "natural" products or they are presented as advanced new technologies offering conveniences that the original materials could not. Either way the pervasiveness of the faux and the futuristic changes the realm of the authentic for all of us. By using craft and design Diana make sculptures that reflect both the artificiality and the realness of the familiar and contrasts the desire for wealth with the American imitation of it.
John Bauer also makes high/low hybrid art, except his fascination is the role of corporate influence in the interpretation of Art. Think mass-produced early modernist abstraction purchased at the local mall. John finds inspiration in how life is reflected through artistic choices of design in offices, lobbies, waiting rooms, museum and gallery spaces. Often the d�cor assigned to these spaces creates a heightened sense of non-specific, semi-pleasant neutrality: the tan area rug in a waiting room, the super-white walls of a gallery. The generalized idea of "place" created through these generic non-place spaces destabilizes the subject/object relationship which allows a reversal between the work of art and its audience, the work of art becoming a passive viewer, silently recording the actions of unaware participants in this work-a-day world. Anonymous artists working in multi-faceted styles create the art objects that occupy such spaces and complement the d�cor. In an attempt to underscore the anonymous styles he references, John often signs his first name on the front of his paintings highlighting the generic quality the work. It is the dialectical focus on neutrality and offense even in the white box of the gallery, which creates an extremely charged political space, the location where John navigates his work.
BELLWETHER is an artist-run space in support of emerging artists.
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