Rapporto Annuale 2012 - Palazzo Strozzi

American Dreamers.
Reality and Imagination in Contemporary American Art
CCC Strozzina 9 March–15 July 2012
Does the “American dream” still exist? Taking its cue from this question, the Centre for Contemporary
Culture Strozzina hosted an exhibition entitled American Dreamers. Reality and Imagination in Contemporary
American Art (9 March–15 July 2012), curated by Bartholomew Bland (Hudson River Museum, New York)
and offering a reflection on the work of artists who use their vision, their imagination and their dreams to
build potentially alternative worlds as a response to an increasingly complex and harsh reality.
Fleeing reality is a way of coping with the adversity of the present – a psychological break with daily
life or the creation of a better alternative become strategies designed to avert such concrete threats
as the high unemployment rate, the crisis in the international financial situation and the plethora
of apocalyptic forecasts for our environment. For some artists the construction of fantasy worlds
constitutes their own personal critique of contemporary society, while it allows others to forge new
solutions in which they can rediscover meaning and values that appear to have fallen by the wayside
in this day and age. Some of them also appear to share an interest in manual work which harks back to
manufacturing methods typical of the past or to different ways of organising our existence.
The eleven American artists involved in the exhibition – Laura Ball, Adrien Broom, Nick Cave, Will Cotton,
Adam Cvijanovic, Richard Deon, Thomas Doyle, Mandy Greer, Kirsten Hassenfeld, Patrick Jacobs and
Christy Rupp – offered a personal interepretation of the present, or even a flight from that present, by
building alternative parallel worlds which explicitly turn their back reality. Some of the works encapsulated
the essence of reality in miniaturised systems, while others expanded into space, creating alternative
worlds with which the visitor was challenged to interact, and yet others fed on fantastic, dreamlike images
or else they reflected on such symbolic themes as the home and the family, which continue to play such
a crucial role even today in the construction of the myth of the American way of life.
_
43