KELLY WRITERS HOUSE

Indigene ~
Indigene

PRESS RELEASE

 
INDIGENE ~ INDIGENE
An exhibition of oil paintings & drawings

Contact Person: Peter Schwarz
Art Curator

Indigene ~ Indigene recognizes the place of Theresa Gaskin in contemporary American art whose voice no longer speaks from an excluded "outside" of American arts & letters, whose voice no longer speaks from the periphery of American culture or the confines of an ethno-racial enclave. Indigene ~ Indigene, presented at the Kelly Writers House in conjunction with Indigene's online gallery (www.indigeneart.com), engages the cultural politics of contemporary postmodernism.

Indigene ~ Indigene is an exhibit of subject and space and the relationship between subject and space. The subject of this exhibit calls specific attention to American black culture—its history, its dreams, its struggles, its journeys both physical and psychical—and its marginalization in today's cultural political debates of globalization, its continued struggle for artistic legitimacy outside its own community and beyond its assimilation into pop culture. Yet Indigene's work also reaches out to others and, as Camus said, "communicates their silence" and brings them back to us from their distant exile. At the same time this exhibit invites the necessary dialogues into the space of the Kelly Writers House, a more significant space for cultural intercourse than Philadelphia's commercial galleries, dialogues that need to be initiated in the public forum.

Postmodernism's cultural politics of fragmentation—the drifting towards and the establishment of ethnic enclaves or other cliques disassociated from the body politic beyond appearance, disassociated from the discourses that occupy the body politic's concerns unless times of crisis and tragedy compel reaction—contributes to the process of medievalization afflicting many societies today. In conjunction, the affluence of leftist conservatism, seemingly the guiding rationale of contemporary intellectual discourse in many places, has far too long embraced and propagated the ideology of "politically correct egalitarianism" as its torch in the darkness illuminating not the injustices confronting humanity but revealing the failings of the torchbearers to formulate engaging ideas with which to address and resolve these injustices.

What has resulted: the proliferation of pseudo-intellectualism masquerading as thought, both within and outside the university; a cultural political enterprise that prefers the glamour of mediatized intellectual trends, encourages the specialization of knowledge into "departments" at the expense of the humanities' coherence, legitimates artistic mediocrity and leads many honest social activists to imitate a romanticized avant-garde at the expense of creating a new one; and a politics that has facilitated the spread of reactionary movements and fostered the environments of Algeria, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Chechnya, and the Middle East.

Indigene ~ Indigene is a voice of solidarity calling for a critique of our times, and ourselves, when our times are beset with fanaticism, hate and violence, and while we struggle for effective responses.