Eye of the Needle

A person’s true experience is an enigma. Based upon a diversity of cultural, historic and intellectual factors, an artist’s perception is subject to continual reevaluation and reinterpretations. Artists, challenged with depicting reality, spend their lives constructing and interpreting their own internal points of reference -- places from which to begin, only to return there to re-qualify their identity. This process of creating a work of art derives essentially from a series of combined experiences realigned and reinterpreted over time. While some artist recapitulate experience, others evolve their own intellectual system of interpretation and assimilation, drawing from a variety of sources, including moments of fractured experience, memory and thought. This process derives from an imaginative synthesis of life, a continual exploration that combines facts and ideas transformed into fictive truths. The artists in Eye of the Needle have developed a new way to understand and synthesize images drawn from an amalgam of intellectual and visceral interests and concerns that combine art history and cultural history. This work is socially driven and springs from the acceptance of an implied, rather than a literal history. These works constitute a new translation whereby the artists subvert their own heritage based on a variegated reality, driven by contemporary culture and the inherent desire to translate cultural implications into artistic and human experience.  Eye of the Needle includes contributions by Marlene Dumas, Wendell Gladstone, James Gobel, Eberhard Havekost, Salomon Huerta, Chris Johanson, Karen Kilimnik, Craig Kucia, Matt Leines, Alan Michael, Paul McCarthy, Barry McGee, Faris McReynolds, Kori Newkirk, Paulina Olowska, Raymond Pettibon, Wilhelm Sasnal, Dana Schutz, Elif Uras, Kehinde Wiley and Ai Yamaguchi.