Featured Art Review: Violence

Through January 15 at Los Caminos, 2649 Cherokee Street

Comments (0) By Jessica Baran Thursday, Jan 6 2011

Installation view of "Violence" at Los Caminos.

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Violence Not the interpersonal kind, but the conceptual variety, in which materials, traditions and methods are roughed up and reimagined in ways that express certain antagonistic impulses. Noting a broad cultural current of "violence that is not violence" — perhaps better known as passive aggression — Violence gathers the work of six artists from St. Louis, Kansas City and Chicago who perform all-but-destructive acts through or upon their work. Molly Zuckerman-Hartung affixes torn strips of thrift-store jeans to a small stretched canvas that hangs adjacent to a jagged swath of raw canvas. Justin Gainan scrupulously frames small discarded pieces of dirty paper salvaged from the framing process itself, resulting in what appears to be memorialized detritus. And Brandon Anschultz severs two paintings and conjoins their four halves in a work that elegantly bears the scars of otherwise brutal deconstruction. Also included are photographs by Natalee Cayton that bear accompanying subscripts describing all they failed to capture, and a video by Michael Sirianni called Blanks, which repeatedly captures the burst of a moment when a television is shut off. Through January 15 at Los Caminos, 2649 Cherokee Street; www.loscaminosart.com. Hours: by appointment.

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