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Opening Reception | 2 Art Shows: The Swimmer / Spotlight: Maud Madsen

Thursday, June 6, 2024, 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm

Free

The Swimmer
Curated by Jonathan Rider
Published in The New Yorker in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, John Cheever’s "The Swimmer" is emblematic of mid-century America’s changing perception of its own relationship to class, idealism, and failure, evergreen issues as relevant today as sixty years ago. Cheever’s protagonist, Neddy Merrill—who “might have been compared to a summer’s day”—embarks on the novel adventure to swim home by way of his affluent neighbor’s swimming pools. What begins as a carefree midsummer Sunday devolves into something altogether different and nefarious; Neddy’s life and his grip on reality disappear, pool by pool, the closer he comes to finishing his journey and returning home… whether that’s the same day or perhaps many years later.

This exhibition similarly confuses time and unfolds through a series of disappearances in bodies of water—in pools, lakes, and oceans—through serial works that concern loss and losing oneself. Navigating themes inherent in "The Swimmer" and Cheever’s broader oeuvre, including alcoholism, grandiosity, loss of innocence, selective memory, privilege, sexuality, etc., the exhibition trains an eye to the crumbling of an American dream, set against the glittering backdrop of a string of swimming pools. The ninth floor of the exhibition closely aligns itself with Cheever’s narrative and features a variety of painting, photography, and sculpture in which the body is suggested, but not depicted, positioning the viewer as the “swimmer” in space.  The exhibition’s tenth floor focuses almost exclusively on the figure—the body in water—and explores night swimming, locating the pool as an intimate, self-contained site for mystery and experimentation.

Spotlight: Maud Madsen
The Spotlight series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork paired with a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful conversations between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, scholars, and beyond. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Maud Madsen's Backseaters, 2024. A text by art advisor and writer Maria Vogel accompanies the presentation.

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