Submit to Prolonged Exposure

Artie Vierkant, Exposure Adjustment on a Sunset (stills), 2009

Submissions are now open for Prolonged Exposure curated by Kaegan Sparks.

Deadline Wednesday August 1, 11:59pm

VISIT http://recessionartshows.com/submit/ TO SUBMIT

Selections will be conducted by the Recession Art Jury led by Guest Curator Kaegan Sparks and Art Director Ani Katz. Prolonged Exposure will be held November 3-10 at The Invisible Dog in Brooklyn. Accepting Work in All Media Including Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Performance, Installation, and Video.

About Prolonged Exposure

“I will not make any more boring art.”
–John Baldessari


Prolonged Exposure will ask how we can remain curious and speculative in a culture of desensitizing barrage and static. The exhibition will concentrate on artworks that plumb boredom’s latent energy, provoking a restlessness which precipitates a desire for change.

In scholar Sianne Ngai’s investigation of minor affects or ‘ugly feelings’– diffusive, non-cathartic states like irritation, paranoia, anxiety, or envy which seem increasingly endemic to contemporary culture and aesthetics– she posits a surprising parallel between shock and boredom. Though antithetical in intensity and duration (shock is immediate and staggering, while boredom is tedious and numbing), both emotions induce states of suspended agency: “both are responses that confront us with the limitations of our capacity for responding in general.”

Likewise, our precarious political moment routinely produces both spectacle and detachment. While the U.S. military’s “shock and awe” maneuvers have exploited the disarming effect of the sublime to expedite violence, representations of such atrocities also have paralyzing power. Through recapitulation and gloss, the mediated registers via which the American or global public relates to distant warfare (or even more proximate disasters) can evoke ennui. Prolonged exposure is liable to dilute a bewildering event, resigning outrage to torpor.

Works for Prolonged Exposure may engage durational, automatic, repetitive, or tedious strategies, or seek to distract a viewer from object to ambience. They may employ exhaustive formal processes (lists, serial marks, obsessive indices) or excessive collecting functions which fatigue or frustrate attempts to parse or absorb. They may defuse trenchant source materials or deploy simulacral repetition to simultaneously jade and distress. They may be overwhelmingly monotonous, removed, spatially or temporally boundless, or reflect an inordinate amount of routine labor. They may feature bland or unremarkable landscapes that lack a commanding subject, have a presence so mundane or subtle as to be overlooked altogether (as wallpaper or Erik Satie’s furniture music), or implement ‘uncreative’ or appropriative techniques and absurdum.

Rejecting stultification for an enabling state of openness or receptivity, such practices will galvanize idleness born of surfeit or repetition, seeking to overhaul viewers’ sensory and interpretive habits and engender new modes of attention. As John Cage intoned: “If they say something is boring after two minutes, try it for four…”

Visual artists who are accepted to a Recession Art Show receive a one-week exhibition at the Invisible Dog in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Video and performance artists who are accepted will negotiate directly with staff to plan a screening or performance schedule based on their needs. The deadline for submissions is Wednesday, August 1st. Artists will be notified of acceptance by August 31st. Please contact [email protected] with any questions.