For Immediate Release:
Extra Virgin

The idea for this show and how I curated it is derived from a video, Watch for Children, in which a young man, striving for reincarnation of his adolescent self, builds a robot. With bones made of wood, teeth made of clay, muscles mimicked with air pneumatics, and a brain swapped for a simple computer chip, he demands for there to be life in this five-foot tall automaton. However, like the lightning of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, there is still a missing or corrupted element and the robot never achieves real boyhood.  

Both Philadelphia based artist Christopher Davison and Mike Stifel will be showing new sculptural bodies of work that break from their more well known mediums.  Davison who has recently shown drawings at the University of the Art in Philadelphia and Fette’s Gallery in Los Angeles, will have several uncanny stiched figures whom are genderless yet not without a strong sense of individual identity.  Recently having a successful show at the 201 Gallery, Mike Stifel re-scripts Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by bringing to life sensual soap foam sculptures that have a life expectancy of only a couple of hours. 

With artists from Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, this show is an embodiment of the parts becoming a whole.  The extra-virgin show is a singular consciousness creating a patchwork virginal body.  That is, until the audience arrives and explores the individual parts and the show’s purity is lost through varying interpretations.