Transformers

In this exhibition of paintings, photographs, sculpture, videos and prints by 18 contemporary artists, guest curator Ralph Rugoff examines the mutating being of fable and myth as it reappears in the art of the late 201h century.  

Rugoff’s catalogue essay posits questions: If for a modernist body is no more than an emblem of the essential self within, what constitutes a postmodern anatomy? Is it a mutating body, as in fable and myth? Does it recall Frankenstein and The Thing? What are the limits and ranges of its metamorphoses? How does it interact with other bodies? The artists in Transformers offer an array of responses to these questions, and raises many more of their own. 

They challenge the limits of culturally assigned roles summoning up metamorphosing anatomies and identities that mix gender, ethnicity, color, and even species. These beings are unconventional and unstable, always changing and incomplete, and they turn our attention to the very social "norms" they defy. In order to negotiate society's increasing complexities, the artists in Transformers suggest that traditional versions of autonomous and coherent selfhood be replaced with provisional forms of identity that, by virtue of their adaptability, are capable of empathy.  

As Ralph Rugoff states in his catalogue essay - The "Transformative aesthetics point out the holes in our fixed categories and moralities and teach us how to make them playable.” 

Artists in the exhibition are Jimmie Durham, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Komar & Melamid, Charles LeDray, Glenn Ligon, Christian Marclay, Paul McCarthy, Yasumasa Morimura, Catherine Opie, Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman, Anna Deavere Smith, Meyer Vaisman, Kukuli Velarde, and Fred Wilson. A 72-page illustrated catalogue with an essay by guest curator Ralph Rugoff, an independent curator and writer based in Los Angeles, accompanies the exhibition. 

Transformers is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by Independent Curators Incorporated (ICI), New York, a non-profit traveling exhibition service specializing in contemporary art. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible in part, by grants from The Nathan Cummings Foundation, Inc., The Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.