Who: artdc Gallery
What: Death of Socrates
Where: 5710 Baltimore Ave., Hyattsville, MD 20781
Web: www.artdc.com
Exhibition dates: 7/27/14 – 8/31/14
Reception: Saturday, 8/2/14 7-9:30 p.m.
Discuss: http://artdc.org/forum/index.php?topic=16806.0
Twitter: https://twitter.com/artdc/status/493540442395648000
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/727106970668821/

Beginning at any point and continuing on infinitely into space, as each new line is created moving outward in any direction, a structure begins to form in the empty space an armature in which to construct our universe. The components of this network Michael Faraday called “lines-of-force,” an invisible electrically charged, tentacle-like network that spread invisibly through the earth’s matter and the space surrounding the earth. This network describes the rational natural law which is made visible through the artist’s grid. The exhibition is entitled The Death of Socrates which is taken from Jacques Louis David’s painting of Socrates’ death by hemlock. Painted during the Enlightenment (a rebirth of analytical thought) one can see the grid in the studies and faintly in David’s finished painting, the logical structure on which the painter and the subject created their worlds. Society now having a structure on which nature itself is built will look inward in an attempt to bring order to the ugliness of mankind. Through abstraction the Cubists, Futurists, and Suprematists attempted to bring form to the alogical psyche. Drawing transforms perception into naming, rendering into form, and it is in this naming that the artist and the spectator begin to know themselves and the world around them. The work displayed in this exhibition differs in style and conceptual content, points of overlap can be discerned in the graphic and a textual convention associated with line and grid, and conveys multiple perspectives on their use in contemporary art. The viewer is invited to enter this historical and conceptual dialogue with the work in an attempt to capture the multitude of vantage points with which interpretations can be made and a knowing can occur.

Guest Curator: Robert Long

Artists:
Chris Bransome
Paul Hrusa www.paulhrusa.com
Shanthi Chandrasekar www.shanthic.com
Teresa Sites www.teresasites.com
Jay Hendrick www.jayhendrick.com
Xavier McNellage www.xaviermcnellage.com
Robert Long www.robertlong.weebly.com