| The Areality Show: Whose Reality?September 5, 2006- September 23, 2006Reception: September 7, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm Viridian Artists at 530 West 25th Street in Chelsea is opening its fall 2006 season with a provocative group exhibit that explores artistic interpretations of reality and areality. Gallery artists and guests have been invited to create a reality with the madness of life and the unreality of reality in mind.
The dictionary says reality is the fact of being real, existing or actual. If you put an A in front of a word, it means the opposite: not reality or without. Going to the web, the dictionary of the 21st Century, (as well as being many other things in life today) and looking up areality, yielded fascinating results including numerous websites, "shared quirks & ancient arealities".
With the advent of "The Reality Show" phenomena on television, the concept of reality has begun to resemble a Luis Borges or Gabriel Garcia Marquez surreal novel more than it does everyday life and like areality, begins to embody two senses.
To believe something to be real, if we weren’t there to see it, requires some kind of evidence and even then, it still might not be real or true. Even before electronic media that was true, but now, even more so. No longer is a photograph, or a document necessarily proof. Neither is the re-telling by an eye-witness necessarily proof, since each witness might, and usually does, see a different reality. Movies & politics have made reality even more ambiguous than existential philosophers once thought it to be. Consider the "Spin" on news and reportage as it today.
Artists now, more than ever, have the power to change their interpretation of or the appearance of reality. In the 19th century it was trompe l'oeil painters, in the 20th century, photo-realists. Now, digital photography can make a painting a photo and vise versa.
For this opening show, No size, media or subject limits the artwork. Only these artists' interpretation of what areality is, but in fact, what is that?
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