museum of new art 

CUT OUT YOUR MOTHER'S EYES

THE MONA PRIZE 2015

with

Troy Hoffman

 

and Special Guest Artist

Daniel Greenberg

 

OPENING RECEPTION:

July 17 - 6pm to 9pm

 

 

CUT OUT YOUR MOTHER'S EYES

 

If someone is skeptical of the magical relation between an image and what it represents Art Historian Tom Cummins offers a pedagogical exercise to illustrate a point—take a photograph of your mother and cut out the eyes. The good son or daughter would not be able to do it.1

 

Roland Barthes comes to an analogous conclusion when confronted by a photograph of his mother in a winter garden. Looking at this photograph Barthes could not use semiotics to demystify the idea of “the image [as] re-presentation, which is to say ultimately resurrection.”2 

 

These unlikely examples embody a common approach towards image making in Hoffman’s and Greenberg’s practice, which vacillates between mystical belief and critical attitudes.

 

The first layer of Hoffman’s and Greenberg’s work is an emotional puncture.

In Hoffman’s work this is achieved by a collision of bestial and uncanny imagery. Greenberg uses labor exercised by tedious drawing, physically piercing marks into a surface, signifying penetration, devotion, and discipline. 

 

A second layer in both artists’ practice is purely linguistic, working from images that are more commonly read then seen. Images with pre-existing cultural implications are approached sideways rather than straight on as a means to address queer sexuality, which requires a rethinking of normative terminology.

 

1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 75.

2 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 9.

 

@ Midtown MONA | Galerie Camille

4130 Cass Ave, Detroit, MI  48201

 

Regular Hours: 12pm to 5pm Wednesday through Saturday.