ADAM MYSOCK

JONATHAN FERRARA GALLERY is proud to announce What is Not Us, an exhibition of Cincinatti-based artist Adam Mysock. For his third solo show at the gallery, Mysock unveils a new series of his characteristic revisionist-art historical, masterly detailed, acrylic paintings. The exhibition will be on view in the main gallery from 21 September through 29 October 2016 with a First Saturday Gallery Opening on 1 October from 6-9pm in conjunction with the annual Art for Arts’ Sake citywide art openings.

The artist says of the exhibition . . .

If a continuum exists between truth and fiction, conspiracy theories seem to drift slightly above it, mocking the spectrum’s limitations. 

To behold such defiance is entertaining.  It’s frightening.  And it’s addictively empowering. 

As conspiracy theorists cherry-pick accommodating nuggets of fact, rearrange them into innumerable, distorted realities, and seduce us into exporting our vulnerabilities, we get to imagine the abandonment of social rules and mores as a plucky act against an oppressive power.  We get to experience that life-affirming heart-rate increase that comes when we’re scared.  Furthermore, we get to form identity groups based on the non-existent patterns we choose to perceive around us.

For decades, perhaps some of our most gripping conspiracy theories have involved tales of alien visitation.  In my youth (during the 1980s and 90s) television shows and movies—from The X-Files to Alien, from Alf to Close Encounters of the Third Kind—offered abundant opportunity to speculate on secretive visitors from distant worlds.  These days, in the middle of the 2016 presidential race, it’s our political discourse that seems to supply many of the most prominent conspiracy theories about secretive visitors; only now, our aliens are illegal rather than extraterrestrial, coming from Syria or Mexico instead of Mars or a far-off galaxy. 

It is exactly this curiously persevering subject matter and the shifting authors and venues shaping our conspiracy theories that led to What Is Not Us.

Fundamentally, the paintings in this show examine the enduring qualities of the alien* as conspiracy subject.  The theorists of our age gravitate toward seeing the alien as a harbinger of some discomfort; they habitually contaminate a believer’s fragile sense of self.  The alien is typically presented as singularly focused, with motives rarely shaped by nuance. And the alien is usually afforded just enough of the exotic for the over-suspicious to become lazily curious, interested enough to look over but not to come over.

However, with all conspiracy theories evoking themes of shifting power—which group has it and which group wants it—the work in What Is Not Us is also meant to encourage consideration of an unstable impression of our self-perceived sense of control.  It’s meant to provide a space in which we might reflect on the political climates that yield conspiracy theories, specify how we envision the mysterious players of these explanatory narratives, and question the rationality of searching for an antagonist or conspiracy theories in the first place.