Authentic Realities

Authentic Realities 

Catalyst Contemporary presents Authentic Realities, an art exhibition featuring new work from the recent artist addition to their growing roster. Sobia Ahmad, Damon Arhos, and Erick Antonio Benitez’s works speak uniquely about their constantly evolving communities, challenging the status quo, and creating a better common future.

The phrase, Authentic Realities, defines a growing movement in contemporary art. Each artist in this movement has a direct link to their subject matter or the starting point for their creativity is based in reality -- a real event or set of experiences acting as the core of their practices. The resulting works speak to illustrate their experiences, often referencing, not focused solely on past events, personal or cultural connections, and link them to the present. As well, all of these artists have social and community components. They seek to address, normalize, and give visibility to the communities they belong to, and to bring the issues facing each group to the forefront of mainstream culture.

Sobia Ahmad’s painterly-like series, wherever you are is called Here is a collection of black and white screen prints woven together with rice bags. The works visualize the concept of Here and how the elusive space is influenced by ever changing factors. This tension is further illustrated by the lack of hard and clean lines between the black and white. The use of maps and satellite images of the streets of her hometown Gujranwala, Pakistan, her grandfather’s rice fields, state lines and zip codes in the U.S., the border of India and Pakistan, and the rooftop of her childhood home, allude to momentary states of mind, and fraught socio-political realities. 

Through the technique of weaving, Ahmad is paying homage to her own ancestral history of rice farming and daily rituals. Interwoven and layered, Ahmad’s maps of places and borders become faded and pixelated calling into question the true stability of our current geography and by extension, our homes. The pieces in the gallery, flags, wall hangings, and a large woven mat that imitates the size of a traditional Islamic prayer-sized rug, speak of Ahamd’s larger interdisciplinary practice that explores how our deeply intimate struggles of belonging inform larger conversations about national identity, cultural memory, and gender roles as imposed by her birth culture through the use and study of language. 

Damon Arhos’ Agnes Moorehead & Me series depicts hybrid digital images of actress Moorehead (best known for her role Endora on the TV show Bewitched) and his own self-portraits. Arhos then paints the amalgamations in order to demonstrate his own admiration of her achievements, wearing them like a mask of empowerment, and continues his self-described obsession with her and her career. The bright and bold colors push and pull each other constantly, never allowing a sense of stillness to exist within the picture plane. This tension mimics how culturally, we fight our own selves in order to conform to the expectations of society. Furthermore, the scale of the paintings, seven-by-six-feet, push the limits of the medium and material presence causing the merging of the abstracted identities to envelope and almost consume the viewer. By merging his features and aspiring to become like Moorehead, Arhos pushes the boundaries and rules of gender roles, our ability to gain empowerment from those not within our own gender, and his own queer identity. 

Erick Antonio Benitez’s work, a series of complex images printed on metal and a group of sculptural works using copper piping, meditates on his experience as a first generation El-Salvadoran American. Evolving from his experiences during his youth where he encountered police and gang activity, Benitez discovered the wonders and healing properties of art. From there, his work incorporates the religious practice of mysticism proposing connections to our environment and people’s value. In a cloud of hazy iridescent colors, the metallic prints merge photos of plants, camouflage, and images captured from his recent research trip to the Amazon rainforest. Benitez’s sculptural work suspends his “paintings” using a framework of copper and steel chain.  The paintings are camouflage wrapped around stretchers and then paired with other objects. The fusion of patterns and materials replicate items in nature in order to challenge and subvert stereotypes of migrants and their children, traditional roles and uses of patterns, colors, and materiality in order to humanize his subjects and our own relationship to nature.

Currently, a wide swath of contemporary art is thrusted into the umbrella of Post-Modernism and the many iterations of Post-Post-Modrenism. However, as we move deeper into the 21st century, cohesive trends emerge. Ahmad, Arhos, and Benitez are not the first artists to utilize the key components of the Authentic Realities movement. They are joining the ranks of others such as Felix Gonzales-Torres, Paul Rucker, Doris Salcedo, Joyce J Scott, Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson whose mediums, methods, and techniques vary but all reference the past to comment on the present and seek to change the future. 

​Authentic Realities is a direct response to the current socio-political environment riddled with divisiveness, fracturing of civil cohesion, a renewed fear of “others,” and the loss of a clear sense of what is real and who has the power to fabricate and dictate our shared realities. By basing their practices, subject matters, and storytelling in reality, Ahmad, Arhos, and Benitez are expanding upon the types of stories told in mainstream culture and defining who is allowed to lead such expansions by authenticating our multitude of shifting realities. Their authentic work speaks of humanism and the  common experience of home, self, and nature that we all share. 

​Exhibition Dates: March 12th - April 30th, 2020

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 12th, 6-8PM 

Artist Talk: Saturday, April 25th, 3-4PM