Group Show

Luis De Jesus Seminal Projects is very pleased to announce SOCIAL CLIMBING, to be presented from August 8 through October 24, 2009.  SOCIAL CLIMBING will feature the work of nearly 40 artists, among them some of the best and brightest emerging artists in San Diego, as well as a small, select group representing Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Charleston.

With its pithy, tongue-in-cheek title, SOCIAL CLIMBING reflects the thought-provoking strategy of this exhibition, organized in the form of a continuously changing group show.  It will be presented in two parts: Part I from August 8-September 5, and Part II from September 12-October 24.  Over the course of each segment artworks will be rotated and re-installed alongside other works, allowing them to be considered in new and different contexts.  This "shuffle" strategy will allow SOCIAL CLIMBING to circumvent the traditionally static presentation of many gallery and museum exhibitions and a format that often codifies the artwork into a prescribed meaning within the context of an exhibition.  This freedom to mix it up as and when we wish will allow us to literally reinvent the show and find new connections between the artwork exhibited, altering not only the way the individual works and the exhibition are understood and appreciated, but, consequently, of the critical discourse that follows. 

SOCIAL CLIMBING takes its cue from legendary New York art dealer Paula Cooper, who in the first years of her seminal SoHo gallery, in the early 1970s, would change the location of works over and over again during the course of an exhibition, typically lasting several months or more.  Through this approach Cooper was able to "show how different works can clarify the information contained in each other by their differences or seeming similarities, and can introduce a dialogue."  Thus, a visitor to a particular show might have discovered a Donald Judd next to a Carl Andre, and, a few weeks later on a different wall in another location of the gallery, find the same Judd installed next to a Keith Sonnier or a Jackie Winsor.  SOCIAL CLIMBING can also be understood as engaging in an institutional critique of the gallery space-as-real estate and the idea of "positioning" in today's art world (market), questioning the very notion of prominence and status among artists and its web of hierarchies.  A wide range of personal and social themes will be explored throughout the individual works.