Better a Live Ass Than a Dead Lion
Curated by David Kasprzak
Eli Ridgway Gallery, San Francisco · October 8 – November 5, 2011
Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present Better a Live Ass Than a Dead Lion, a group exhibition of Bay Area artists curated by David Kasprzak, with work by Elisheva Biernoff, Joshua Churchill, Matthew Kennedy, Sean McFarland, Richard Misrach, Dean Smith, and Lindsey White.
The title takes its cue from the Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton's unapologetic approach to life as an expedition — and the failure that occasionally accompanies it. Bringing together photography, video, film, and installation, the exhibition builds a narrative around exploration as a creative process: an exploration of the miraculous through constructed landscapes, fictional histories, and the documentation of real journeys.
Works in the exhibitionBy artist · click to enlarge
Elisheva Biernoff
Closing Remarks: Glacier National Park
Closing Remarks: Monte Verde Cloud Forest
Inheritance
Last Letter: George Bass
Last Postcard: Lillian Alling
Long Story Short
Memento: Sigizmund Levanevsky
Temporarily Removed
Joshua Churchill
Trembling Void
Untitled
Matthew Kennedy
It's Come Down To This
Sean McFarland
Archipelago
Coastline
Glacier
Mountain Through the Clouds
Park Ice
Untitled (dark sea)
Richard Misrach
Untitled
Dean Smith
steganographic memories #2
steganographic memories #4
steganographic memories #6
Lindsey White
Observed in Salvation Mountain, Executed in New Haven, CT
Pittsburgh, PA
Death Valley
Installation viewsEli Ridgway Gallery, San Francisco, 2011
Epigraph
“We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had suffered, starved, and triumphed, grovelled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole. We had seen god in his splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.”