Writer and cultural critic Hilton Als has turned his talents toward curating with “Figuratively Speaking: Art in Advertising, Writing in Art,” on view now at Creativity Explored.
The show primarily focuses on the work of Creativity Explored artist Douglas Sheran, who was with the studio for artists with developmental disabilities from 1984 to 2008. The body of work Als selected focuses on Sheran’s intervention with paint onto magazine advertisements. The paint’s concealing effect over the figures in the ads both obscures the details and emphasizes the power of the forms themselves.
“What’s beautiful about his work is that he’s taken the real and reimagined it,” said Als. “One of the things that was so moving to me was his incredible ideas about figuration, but also, in a popular medium. Everything that he does has this kind of grotesque lyricism that hyper-realizes it in a way you hadn’t imagined before. When we look at an ad, we’re taking it as a literal truth. When you reimagine the literal truth, it takes you up short. I think it’s a wonderful way of destabilizing us.”
The show also features work by Creativity Explores artist Bertha Otoya, a Peruvian printmaker whose work evokes script and writing, and Roland Record, an artist whose gridded drawings have earned comparisons to maps or architectural blueprints. These more textually oriented pieces make a compelling combination displayed alongside Sheran’s figure-based works.