March 2016 / Lost In Transit

Lost In Transit

Todd Baldwin
Marc Blumthal
Mark Brosseau
Lewis Colburn
Christina P. Day
Marianne Dages
William DiBello
Leslie Friedman
Terri Saulin Frock
Alexis Granwell
Ezra Masch
Alexis Nutini
Joanna Platt
Kayla Romberger
H. John Thompson
Douglas Witmer
Tamsen Wojtanowski
Ricky Yanas

March 03 – April 02, 2016
Reception / Thursday, March 03, 6–8pm

“Cooper’s plane landed in Seattle, but only temporarily. The passengers debarked and the plane was loaded with items he demanded as terms of his ransom: parachutes, fuel, and, of course, money. Airborne again, Cooper directed the captain to fly to Reno, but only Cooper never reached that destination. He was somewhere between Portland and Seattle—and more than a million dollars richer in today’s currency—when he opened the passenger door and parachuted into the cloud cover below. The plane’s captain could feel the precise moment when Cooper was gone, he said. The tail lifted. Where was Cooper trying to go? He wasn’t saying, and no trace of him has ever been found.”

— Sally Eckhoff, from “Holding Our Own: John Thompson’s Invisible Travelers”

Lost in Transit explores mythologies of disappearance, the anxiety of travel, and the precarious nature of man-made structures in the work of eighteen Philadelphia artists. Using H. John Thompson’s 2014 sculptural project Holding Our Own (2014), the focus of which is the legend of DB Cooper, the only unsolved airline hijacking in US history, as a jumping-off point, the members of each gallery were prompted to dig into their own bodies of work (new and old) to find formal and contextual similarities that would link them to this loaded subject. In doing so the exhibition acts as a kind of detective tale looking for clues, piecing together bits of information, and attempting to follow elusive threads of continuity and synchronicity within a diverse collection of styles and practices.

The exhibition includes pieces by Marc Blumthal, Marianne Dages, Christina P. Day and Ricky Yanas that engage in the distortion, breakdown, and absence of their subjects. Prints and sculpture by Alexis Granwell, Leslie Friedman,Terri Saulin Frock, and Tamsen Wojtanowski suggest complex and elusive languages that exist outside the realm of logic and rationality.  A selection of suitcases made especially for Tiger Strike Asteroid Philadelphia’s space in December’s Artist-Run at The Satellite Show Miami Beach will also be included.  These subversive objects hint at the tricky nature of contemporary navigation and travel while also referring to the gallery’s own institutional history.

Together, the works selected for this exhibition form a conceptual trajectory that moves viewers in and out of iconic and banal imagery, ethereal and hardedge forms, light and dark spaces, and into a search for something that may have never been there.

TIGER STRIKES ASTEROID PHILADELPHIA is an artist-run space located in Philadelphia, PA and is part of the larger Tiger Strikes Asteroid network, which also includes locations in New York and Los Angeles. Each space is independently operated and focuses on presenting a varied program of emerging and mid-career artists. Their goal is to collectively bring people together, expand connections and build community through artist-initiated exhibitions, projects, and curatorial opportunities.

NAPOLEON is a collective whose members share the financial and managerial responsibilities of running the gallery. Their core values as a collective are responsibility (to our community and to our craft), inclusivity (of all types of art and artists), and creativity (in the work that we do and how we run our collective). As an exhibition space, they hope to improve the visibility of under-recognized art and artists in their region by curating month-long exhibitions. Alternately, they provide a platform for artist-members to show their work in our gallery while participating in collaborative exchanges with other galleries, both in Philadelphia, PA and beyond.