Lots of Things Like This

Apex Art
"291 Church Street - between Walker and White Streets, just two blocks south of Canal Street. The 1 and 9 trains stop at Franklin Station."
[New York, New York]

Lots Of Things Like This
organized by Dave Eggers

April 2 - May 10, 2008
Opening reception: Wed, April 2, 6-8PM

"This show will explore a very small and specific type of artmaking exemplified by contemporary people like David Shrigley, Raymond Pettibon, Nedko Solakov, and Tucker Nichols. This kind of art, which we refuse to name, is somewhat crude, usually irreverent, and always funny. It exists somewhere between one-panel cartoons and text-based art. What we're talking about, basically, is a show of about 100 works that subscribe (unknowingly) to the following criteria: a) they're drawings, usually very basic or crude; b) these drawings are accompanied by hand-drawn text on the artwork, and this text refers to the drawing, much like a caption; c) this caption-text is funny. So in many ways you might say these are cartoons, because we’ve just listed the qualifications of a cartoon. But the works in this show are usually found in galleries, not newspapers or magazines, and so we have something interesting to think about: Is humor allowed in art, and in what forms? Are captions allowed in art, and why? And most importantly, why doesn’t David Shrigley spell better?"

— Dave Eggers

[image by Maira Kalman, from exhibition catalogue available for download online on the apex art site.]