What is the role of a non-profit, alternative contemporary art space? It can provide generous opportunities to unrepresented artists, daring to exhibit current issue-oriented work that challenges audiences, welcoming ephemeral gestures and new forms, embracing intellectual and visual risks. In addition, these are defining and hopefully transformative times, testing the role of American artists and curators, confronting us with unforeseen opportunities to review our cultural production.

Contemporary curatorial practice in America should thus consider a reality check, a brave new scholarship and practice that truly regards the future, beyond the conspiratorial distractions of popular entertainment, the seductions of fashion advertising, and nostalgia for the past hegemony of whiteness as Modernism. Moreover, the art market cannot continue to be the primary measure of art career success and credibility, turning everything into celebrity décor.

Considering the current state of the world, some of the most interesting contemporary art practices are the byproduct of multidisciplinary efforts toward achieving social equality, peace, and conservation. In fact, this exciting evolution may be what saves American art from a total capitulation to increasing textbook academicism, generating a new sterile set of conceptual conventions, and ongoing art world cynicism, and their consequent art fair banality spectacles. Traditionalists may not like it, but they might consider patience, not because this is a passing phase and they will have the last word, but because they should hold judgment for the sake of their own place in art history.

Our unsustainable American dream world of abundance and waste is ceasing to exist. A humbled more austere world, or what may be left of it after war, terrorism, pollution, species extinction, natural disasters, fossil fuel exhaustion, and drinking water crises will require different cultural producers and products. The 20th century is soon to be reviewed by different standards. However, I do not advocate a return to old-fashioned 20th century activism; I am simply interested in our next steps in eco-human evolution and their cultural expression.

The 2005 Annual is not a formally curated exhibition. This exhibition is the result of an open call for submissions that, as we all know, produces a long and uneven list of applicants. This particular annual is not about artistic careerism, but about an attempt by artists to transcend the self and touch collective crucial issues, even as deeper analyses remain to be done. The resulting show is unapologetically imperfect. Nevertheless, creating a forum for critical content through still-evolving forms is more important right now than yet another big show for art world insiders. This annual attempts to be the beginning of a conversation with audiences.

Surfing the show, artist Amy Callahan addresses a specific community’s character, while Elizabeth Hickock, Mary Iverson, and Ryan Worsley contextualize contemporary life in the larger and often dehumanizing urban landscape, ranging from the coldness of the corporate tower to the fragility of a city of made of Jell-O awaiting an apocalyptic earthquake. Many address the state of nature, either from the air, such as Heather Joy’s Kansas grids, to the ground level pathos of Timothy Cross’ solitary gopher, and the brutal hunting mob of Ryan Mrozowski. There is Noah Doely’s playful but emblematic burning tree, Michael Schall’s small but dramatic dismantling of western landscape, and Richard Zimmerman’s haunting melting northern icescape. Jennifer Zwick’s suburban mother and daughter seem to rediscover nature’s presence at midnight, while Peter Dobill sensually acts out extinction. In addition, there are renderings of a new more synthetic nature through Tom Mueske’s paint-by-numbers yellow memory, and Felice Grodin and Lars van Doren’s computer-related topographical mappings.

On the war front, artist Yasmin Etemedi places herself on the front-page archetypal hole of the Middle East, while Leat Klingman draws our simplistic perception of suicidal recruitment. Michael Scoggins gives us comics as transparent metaphors for the boy fantasies of empire, Tivon Rice traces bombardment historically but in an equally media popular way, Ann Gradwohl tries to deconstruct the parody of antiterrorism, and Christina Nguyen Hung photographs the Petri dishes of blind nationalism by faith. In the end, beyond the human losses of 9/11, which I personally witnessed, what seems most threatened is democracy in Alison Crocetta’s minimal video, and Katrina Rhein’s painterly speechlessness, along with a tortuous fate for the human body, as in Ariana Russell’s painful photographs. Masculinity and violence, foundation elements to militarism, are touched upon by David Rios’ disturbing video, Daniel Kariko’s polyptychs, Barbara Smith’s shooting range, and Clare Grill’s work on paper. Then, there are the crossroads of nature and war, such as Scott Foldesi’s gas station, Joseph Stengel-Goetz containment, and the combination of Kristi Malakoff’s little cabin and Ben Schachter’s just-keep-shopping statement.

The second goal that informed this year’s national selection was a great love for regionalism. Of the 533 applications received and the 32 artists selected, a third were from Washington State. Globalism consists of a multitude of interdependent regions, of big and small, public and private places that, as individual units, are profoundly specific, personal, and even intimate. Moreover, it is only when artists achieve this intimacy that the narratives of one place connect with the narratives of another, generating networks of understanding. The success of global culture depends on the preservation of regional cultures. Informed regionalism is the basis for humanistic globalism.

I would like to thank Jim O’Donnell for his generous advice, as well as my curatorial assistant, Melissa Messina, whose candor and sharp insight informed this laborious marathon process.

Ernesto Pujol, Curator
October 2005, New York