Adrienne DeGuevara at Micro Plot
Quit Watching Reality Quietly – Quietly Watching Reality Quit
A Secret Plot is back with a new street exhibit featuring the work by Santa Barbara-based artist Adrienne DeGuevara. In typical Secret Plot fashion the art demands the viewer’s full concentration and does not give anything away without effort. It’s the way that art should be.
Inspired by the insecurities of the post-postmodern experience, where media turns the last vestiges of humanity into vaporwave, DeGuevara asks a simple but important question about our complicity in the making and sustaining of that experience. Indeed, are we quitting watching reality quietly or are we quietly watching reality quit? Whoever has watched the recent ‘presidential debate’ will surely understand the sentiment.
In another Secret Plot fashion, an argument can be made that it is precisely BECAUSE we abandoned metaphysics in favor of the hard sciences, and the all-too-sober rationality from which they originate, that we are saddled with a world that no longer makes sense. As the dictum dictates, to the outside observer all advanced technology and scientific achievement take on the appearance of magic. Reality disintegrates into obscure notions of increasingly smaller and smaller particularities that can no longer coalesce into a coherent worldview. In this kind of modernity different realities compete for primacy, but none have the ability to fend off their adversaries when they become hegemonic, however briefly. In such a world, reality, even the most tenuous or fake, will have to be imposed by brute force and evidence of that is now everywhere to see.
A Secret Reception for the artist will be held on Friday, July 5th at 6pm, on the sidewalk at the corner of Bart’s Books in Ojai.
