SURF CLUB - A group show at Vox Populi that includes past and current UPenn MFA students!

Artists: Alex Nguyen, Barb Smith, Barnett Cohen, Benjamin Schmitt, Carmichael Jones, David Freund,Emily Davidson, Gonzalo Reyes Rodriquez, Grace Miceli, Gwendolyn Rooker, Jane Irish, Jeff Williams,Jonathan Santoro, Katherine Hubbard, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Liz Rodda, Lucia Thomé, Michele Pearson Clarke, Mike Flemming, Mylinh Chau, Nickolay Lamm, Sarah Anderson, Sean Gerstley and Katie Stout, Stefan Abrams, Stephen McLaughlin, Xavier Schipani

EXHIBITION DATES: January 9 – February 1, 2015
OPENING: Friday,January 9, 6.00 to 10.00 pm
GALLERY TALK: Sunday, January 25, 3.00 pm, moderated by Bree Pickering
SURF CLUB LECTURE: Friday, January 23, 7.00 pm, by Marisa Olson

With eight new artist-members joining us in fall of 2014, the new Vox Populi membership of 26 split into four groups, one for each of our four core gallery rooms. The curatorial approach of this exhibition is loosely inspired by an internet Surf or Surfing Club, where a group links to content on the web and respond to one another’s submissions while drawing loose or tight connections between disparate content they’re consuming in the public sphere of the web. Curated collectively and entirely through digital image sharing, one member of each group started the exhibition with a work of an external artist that was passed on to fellow members and then responded to in-the-round by the subsequent members. With dynamic artists from around the country, leading practitioners in Philadelphia, and a University of Pennsylvania astrophysicist in the mix, the exhibition celebrates artistic networks on the web and within our physical communities.

The results of this sharing model had unique effects on how each exhibition was shaped. With its loose and open framework, members could choose to respond to the previous works through a variety of approaches: its media, aesthetic composition, conceptual content, or a more personal response it evoked. With four distinct sub-exhibitions, Surf Club presents each room in a clockwise chronological order of the shared conversation accompanied by a unique gallery guide that will shed light on each of the works and the selection process. One group loosely examined self portraiture which evolved into a play with media, another explored social/biographical/cultural explorations by the artists, the third selected works that explored perception from the performative to the scientific, and the final began in abstraction and obstructed images. Yet the freedom of association inherent in this process allowed each gallery to present its own exceptions to the rule and non sequiturs representative of the open field of content the members could draw from. Surf Club toys with post-internet practice, and how the networks of digital sharing we rely on influence our real-life references, networks, and associations within the physical gallery space.

The following list is of the selected artists shown as they are grouped in the exhibition accompanied by the Vox member who shared and selected their work in parenthesis:

Surf Club 01
Sarah Anderson (Alexander Rosenberg), Gwendolyn Rooker (Ben Will), Grace Miceli (Beth Heinly), Xavier Schipani (Catherine Pancake), Gonzalo Reyes Rodriquez (Chad States), Barnett Cohen (Christopher Manzione)

Surf Club 02
Mylinh Chau (Erica Prince), Liz Rodda (Erin Murray), Jane Irish (Gabriel Boyce), Stefan Abrams (Jay Muhlin), Michele Pearson Clarke (Jesse Harrod), Sean Gerstley and Katie Stout
(Joe Bartram)

Surf Club 03
Katherine Hubbard (Julia Staples), Alex Nguyen (Kelsey Halliday Johnson), Mike Flemming (Kristen Neville Taylor), Benjamin Schmitt (Kirk McCarthy), Nickolay Lamm (Maria Dumlao), Jeff Williams (Mark Stockton), Stephen McLaughlin (Matt Kalasky)

Surf Club 04
Carmichael Jones (Meg Foley), Emily Davidson (Sharon Koelblinger), David Freund (Stephanie Bursese), Barb Smith (Suzanne Seesman), Lucia Thomé (Timothy Belknap), Kameelah Janan Rasheed (Tiona McClodden), Jonathan Santoro (Will Haughery)