[spectre] FREE PLAY at Arcadia University Art Gallery March 18 – April 20, 2014

[marc garrett]

Sorry for any cross posting...

FREE PLAY

March 18 – April 20, 2014
Arcadia University Art Gallery
Curated by Melissa E. Feldman

Participating artists: Cory Arcangel, Patrick Bernier & Olive Martin, 
Ruth Catlow, Mary Flanagan, Ryan Gander, Jeanne van Heeswijk & Rolf 
Engelen, Allan McCollum & Matt Mullican, Paul Noble, Yoko Ono, Pedro 
Reyes, Jason Rohrer, Jennie Shanker, David Shrigley, and Erik Svedäng

Arcadia University Art Gallery is pleased to present Free Play, an 
exhibition that explores works by an international array of artists who 
borrow from play and games to reveal social, philosophical, and cultural 
issues. Curated by Melissa E. Feldman, the show is organized by 
Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. Arcadia University 
Art Gallery is this touring exhibition’s debut venue.

Free Play seeks the initial moment described by Guy Debord, a founding 
member of the Situationist International, an international group of 
social revolutionaries that emerged in the 1960s that aspired to find 
ways to liberate everyday life from the strictures of capitalism. “No 
vital periods ever began from a theory,” Debord stated. “What’s first is 
a game, a struggle, a journey.”

All of the works in the exhibition are functioning games, which gallery 
visitors are free to handle and play. Whether derived from the 
playground, the video arcade, the casino, or the rec room, each example 
serves to create experiences that reflect on contemporary 
socio-political conditions. Collectively, the works in Free Play explore 
interactivity, an expansive topic in both current art and 
exhibition-making with the migration of participatory and live art forms 
into the heretofore foreign territory of the gallery or museum. (Recent 
precedents set by major institutions—including the 2012 Whitney 
Biennial’s generous inclusion of performance works, Gabriela 
Burkhalter’s The Playground Project at the recent Carnegie 
International, and the current exhibition Playgrounds and Really Useful 
Knowledge at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía—expand the 
context for the works in Free Play).

more…
http://gallery.arcadia.edu/free-play/