Group Exhibiotion - FUCKKK KKKAPITALISM
1.09.09 - 30.09.09
925 East 900 South, Suite 37, Salt Lake City UT 84105, USA

List of the artists:
Mindy Kober, Jamison Sarteschi, Circlegal, Rafal Karcz, Donald Fodness, David B. Smith

Iao: Acme Burger Company Gallery is kicking off its fall lineup with a summer show which is designed to counteract the commercialism of summer shows which a typical gallery would pursue. Inspired by Naomi Klein's brilliant "Shock Doctrine" and the silliness of placholders placed by health insurance companies within town hall meetings, the Iao: ABC Gallery is ready to drop some major science by exhibiting a group of Iao PROJECTS and guest artists with artworks which are deliberately anti-commercialism with objects that are not designed for museums
or collectors but as works which are crudely made or subversive of the evils of capitalism.

Apparently artists, either they are right-wing or left-wing, don't like capitalism interfering with their studio practic e, according to a select group of artists chosen by Iao PROJECTS for this hard-hitting commentary of the state of capitalism as America's official state religion.

With the full force of his left-wing tendencies, gallery director and curator Shadna Sieger selects provocative works that manifest strong socialist overtones which use painting, graphic design, and sculpture to tell the CEO's to f-off. With a particular uniqueness, each artist of the group show presents work that can be read with hip Marxist overtones that express why battling capitalism
is such a cool and intellectual thing to do, particularly as Sean Hannity dreams of himself
as the future president of America.

To kick off this controversial show, Mindy Kober, an emerging artist straight out of Houston, Texas, presents a series of gouaches that suggestively celebrates the art of weed smoking and blunts mashed up with fun-loving texts executes in gold leaf and Renaissance calligraphy. Like
a smoking gun, Kober frames each well-formed marijuana plant frond in certain line and a thick hue of ecological green with brilliant draftsmanship and her playful take-off from textbook diagrams with proper caption summing up the joys of a good blunt hit, in particular hip-hop style.

Neo-expressionist graffiti artist Circlegal, arriving from the slums of Salt Lake City, digs
the culture of female prostitution in her messy and freehand trademark style. With her experienced background as a devoted Mormon mixed up with a streak of perverted eye for de Sade and Anais Nin, Circlegal delivers a statement about the nature of sex boots and the use of podophilia and the idea of American capitalism as a left-wing conspiracy to control the free market through sexual deviance. Her right-wing satire of sexual freedom makes her a rather unusual graffiti and installation artist with in the contemporary art world and provides a counterpoint to Kober's liberal stance with a strong and heavy-handed smashing of the fashion world through degrading Marilyn Minter models using crude stick figures as stand-in for rail-thin Kate Mosses off the assembly line of manufacturing model agencies.

Jamison Sarteschi, a gay New York City artist also influenced by graffiti, demonstrates his distaste for capitalism through his metaphors between food, particularly bananas, and male prostitution as a form of commodification. For example, in his 2007 piece "Vintage Stamp," the artist uses double entendres between the autobiographical penis and the peeled-off banana as a sexual commodity that is dehumanizing. Sex is reduced to a mere 37 cents with his overarching hatred for the sexual act, particularly within an urban setting, as a form of fluid exchange like Wall Street bankers caught within a huge orgy of financ ial goo/cum in a deadly euphoria of national suicide.

David B. Smith, a New York conceptual artist, uses the cock banana as a pro-Marxist weapon that fends off capitalism like a Humvee tank with a major case of erectile dysfunction in his photograph "velvet polyester." Appropriating the image of this yellow fruit from the cover of Velvet Underground, Smith demonstrates how the Wall Street culture has used penis size as a stand-in for sexual and potentially financial capital. The collapse of the housing and stock markets is mirrored in this failure of the businessman to maintain his sexual prowess, thus the ultimate sexual failure of capitalism which has designed to make the act of fucking as a comparison litmus test for male socioeconomic status.

Polish mixed mixed artist Rafal Karcz delivers a female counterpart to the male egotism by delivering its female equivalent in his 2008 mixed media ink and watercolor "Dirty London" that reduces American capitalism to a mere trope for female comparison shopping practices. Karcz celebrates the underground by portraying the graffiti writer's hatred for East European models who desire to emulate the Rebecca Bloomwood characters praised in the movie "Confessions of a Shopaholic."

Finally, Colorado artist Donald Fodness expresses his extreme distaste for the American banking system as a perpetual fraud that attempts to shortchange artists by their purchase of emerging art from the studios and the selling of these works for a higher price as they rip off these barely surviving artists who live by bread in MFA programs. His drawing "A Coldwel Banker" suggests that all bankers are cubist by nature since they try to hide bank transactions under deliberate fragmentation like the trickster Picasso. Such financial wizardry, Fodness feels, deserves a huge "what the fuck" symbol all over this system that attempts to package artwork as part of this stock portfolio rather than a true intellectual rapport. This witty artist brings it to the public rough and raw.

Keeping in line with the gallery's sympathetic Marxist agenda, curator Shadna proposes that none of the artworks are allowed to be sold whatsoever during their display, both online and in the physical gallery. Thus the denial of potential sales to the collectors behaves as a middle finger to the freewheeling capitalists who have destroyed contemporary art through its aggressive marketing practices and attempts to foist an anti-intellectual slant like the baldness of Rush Limbaugh.

All artists are represented from Iao PROJECTS and Iao: ABC Gallery. They live collectively in Salt Lake City, UT; Houston, TX; Poland; Boulder, CO; and New York City, NY. Their political orientations range from right-wing  lowbrow-ism to Communist idealization. None of them have shown an interest in replacing a CEO someday.