SHOWS

About the show

Death is inevitable. Every living thing meets its demise at some point. Different cultural customs have been developed to honor and mourn the dead – some elaborate and ornate, while others somber and contemplative, and even sometimes jubilant and joyous. The artists involved in “No Tomorrow” investigate and embrace the beauty of death as a movement for rebirth, contemplation and facing the infinite stillness.

For her video installation Portals, Katina Bitsicas examines the moment when a social media platform accidentally records someone’s death. Recorded from a first person perspective, each video captures not the demise of the victims, but that moment after all movement has stopped. The eerie stillness of each video gives the viewer a glimpse of sky or perhaps the last view the victims saw before they died. Each video makes the viewer aware of moments between life and death and how fleeting it truly is.

Sean Capone’s video Horizon (suspension) serves as an elegy to his childhood landscape, once the site for family gathering and holidays; the land where his grandparents’ generation settled as immigrants, now serving only as their burial ground. Viewers are given a glimpse of repeating horizontal motion as he navigates his way to mourn the death of his grandfather.

Laura Murray examines the fragility of nature and the life cycle of the cicada. Buried underground for the majority of their lives, cicadas emerge for only a brief few weeks at the end of their life. However due to human expansionism, pesticide usage and climate change they face possible extinction. Embellishing their exoskeletons in a lustrous gold, Murray emphasizes their beauty and the life-to-death journey of these amazing creatures.

For Richard Stauffacher’s installation The Reclaiming, the life cycle is examined as different species of fungus absorb and lay claim over human bones. Fungi perform an essential role in the decomposition of organic matter and have fundamental roles in the ever evolving environment. When one thing perishes, others spring to life.

The paintings of Tony Toscani celebrate the liberation between life and death. His skull figures perform every day tasks – playing in the sand at the beach, gossiping, contemplating ones existence – teetering between love and despair, fear and beauty, and humor and sadness. Each painting blurs the line between life and death and death in life.

After the death of artist Kathleen White in September of 2014, Conrad Ventur was invited to stay in the apartment where she and her partner and collaborator Rafael Sánchez lived. While there Ventur was able to able to capture the intimacy of loss and the artifacts that remain and offer an extended presence.

Borrowing the visual language from classical Dutch still life, Kimberly Witham creates photographs culled from her surroundings – flowers and vegetables from her garden and animals and birds, all road kill, found close to her home. These photographs are her personal meditation of beauty, fecundity, fragility and the inevitable march of time.

Credits

Curated by Dan Halm
Featuring Katina Bitsicas, Sean Capone, Laura Murray, Richard Stauffacher, Tony Toscani, Conrad Ventur, and Kimberly Witham

Image: Tony Toscani, Cats Circling Around a Woman, 2017, oil on linen