Gary Mayer, November 2020
The November Art Exhibition, “A Season in Hell,” curated by Gary Mayer with a special bathroom exhibition, “The Inferno,” features four artists Deirdre Day, David Fox, Stephen Lewis, and Gary Mayer.
Gary Mayer
The November Art Exhibition, “A Season in Hell,” curated by Gary Mayer with a special bathroom exhibition, “The Inferno,” features four artists Deirdre Day, David Fox, Stephen Lewis, and Gary Mayer, and opens on September 7, 5-7 PM, and will be on display from Saturday November 7 to Saturday, November 28, 2020.
New Normal health concerns are a primary. The customary Green Kill opening of beverages with finger foods will be covered for protection. If you wish to come on opening day, please understand that 10 people are permitted in the gallery at one time, that all attendees must were face masks, and we will us a “Non-Contact Infrared Digital Thermometer” and “Pulse Oximeter Blood Oxygen Level Monitor” for screening. There were be outside seating for your convenience. Green Kill is equipped with a heat pump so the air is constantly refreshed and the space is, as always, sanitized.
A Season in Hell
What is the meaning of Hell? Certainly it’s a series of just rewards in the Christian world for immoral behavior accumulated over a lifetime. In the more modern world, Hell could also be a state of mind subjected to mental torture and doubt: “I managed to make every trace of human hope vanish from my mind. I pounced in every joy like a ferocious animal eager to strangle it.”
-Arthur Rimbaud, “A season in Hell”
In 2020, With a President who seems to lack any moral compass, guilt, or Christian doubt, “A Season in Hell” becomes harder to define in moral terms, in the immediate sense, we are left with the Covid virus as a temporary form of Hell that we are subjected to, a plague of locusts offering no parable only destruction. The existential state of hell referenced by Rimbaud becomes our collective Nadir, moral judgements are governed by political expediency, science is denied and there are no lessons learned. We have destroyed causality, by that I mean: we have broken the scientific and oddly moral law of cause/effect, by separating current actions from any acknowledgement of their implications on the future. We deny things like carbon emissions being related to climate change, masks being effective in controlling the spread of an airborne virus. Life becomes an eternal groundhog day repeated over and over again existing forever in the present with no acknowledgement of the future.
Surely this is “A Season in Hell” that Dante describes in “The Inferno” a state of eternal suffering with no future?
“A Season in Hell”, also features a site specific bathroom installation by curator Gary Mayer, abetted by the musical selection of the gallery director Mr. David Schell who refers to it (and possibly to our times) as, “the most terrifying Bidet in town.”
Gary Mayer
Gary Mayer, “ Samsara” 2020, Acrylic on canvas.
We’ve all experienced seasons on Hell in 2020. The bathroom I created at a GreenKill is an expression based on Dante’s Inferno. The large painting is a less specific more abstract expression of Hell called Samsara or suffering all 4 panels are filled with overwhelming suffocating experience made into somewaht abstract patterns? May our suffering subside at least a bit and leave room fir some moments of frivolity.
Works in Exhibition
The Inferno
Gary Mayer, “The Inferno,” a work still in progress towards completion.
Artist Gary Mayer has converted Green Kill’s bathroom into “The Inferno.” It’s the hell with a bidet. The nine circles of Dante’s Inferno run up the wall from bottom to top. It includes a audio component, featuring Tele.S.Therion’s “Luzifers Abschied.”