Parallel Phenomena: Works on Paper by Carroll Dunham, Susan Te Kahurangi, Gladys Nilsson, and Peter Saul
Curated by Damon Brandt
January 21 through February 27, 2021
Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York City
Andrew Edlin has staked a legitimate claim to a position of true leadership in the exhibition of self taught artists. As a gallerist, curator, collector, and detail-driven and intellectually rigorous collaborator, his ambitions for the well deserved exposure and elevation of this field is almost evangelical. It was therefore both a welcomed challenge and a pleasure to work closely with him as the curator on Parallel Phenomena: Works on Paper by Carroll Dunham, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Nilsson and Peter Saul.
The exhibition mandate, as detailed in the press release, was to find a common language and related aesthetic concerns between King, a self-taught artist and Saul, Nilsson and Dunham, each of whom were academically trained and are now accepted as icons of their contemporary practice. It was my curatorial imperative to blur the boundaries between ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’, ‘schooled’ and ‘unschooled’, ‘naive’ and ‘sophisticated’, and thereby call into question an ill informed art historical hierarchy and superficial bifurcation that exists between these two worlds. The installation intentionally did not have individual identifying labels and artists were mixed and matched in a provocative association, highlighting the communality of an underlying vocabulary. The result was a celebration of individual inspiration and common purpose, played out through a myriad of inter-related iconography, labyrinthian compositional impulses and a communal obsession and talent for exquisite self-serving draftsmanship.