David Benjamin Sherry 'Semen and Grapes', 2007, Photograph, 243 x 153 cm, 95.7 x 60.2 inches (framed) / photo courtesy Goff+Rosenthal
"His eyes bulging the dying man staggered, his hand moving in a most delicate gesture, letting go, abandoning himself in an almost voluptuous posture that recalled, even in this land of fog, the dulcet clime of the bedchamber..."
Until August 2, 2008 Goff + Rosenthal Gallery presents The Dulcet Clime of the Bedchamber, a group show curated by Nicholas Weist that includes painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, film, and a site-specific installation by an international group of artists. Nicholas Weist (b. 1982), who works and lives in New York, is a writer, editor and curator. He graduated with a photography degree from Bard College, New York. Read the interview with Nicholas Weist.
The Dulcet Clime of the Bedchamber takes its title from Querelle, a novel first published in 1953 by the aggressively gay author and cultural outsider Jean Genet. The passage from which it is drawn concerns the murder of a sailor, and describes the manner of his death in terms of union, and the softness of release. This dolorous but tender moment is a springboard for the show, which includes work that responds to an inherent melancholia within the field desire: for instance because of the inevitability of separation through death.
Similar to the extreme and immersive fantasies made manifest in Genet's fiction, artists included in The Dulcet Clime of the Bedchamber externalize private worlds in works that navigate personal experiences of desire. These intimate and highly charged pieces exist in a liminal space between appetite and agency-acknowledging that desire exists, but firmly rooted in a bog of inaction. In some cases artists generalize the idea of desire, as in Paul Lee's torn blanket sculpture, a quiet monument to past romances. Or alternatively desire is particularized, and focused obsessively on impossible loves-as in Timothy Hull's sculptural Frank O'Hara totem, made of objects and fetishes related to the poet's life and work. Peter Gallo's text sculpture, the word "electrocardiogram" misspelled and made from chicken bones, dental floss, and other material connected to the body, is partly a working-through and partly a protective (though, one would imagine, ineffective) voodoo magic.
These delicate gestures exist where fantasy and reality converge and become undifferentiated, obliquely locating objects of desire, but never approaching them directly.
