Opening: Iron Gate East Presents: Love Is Not All Curated By Kelcey Edwards, Southhampton, New York

 Sarah No. 1, Richard Pasquarelli, 42” x 56”, Oil on Linen 

Iron Gate East Presents:

Love Is Not All

SOUTHAMPTON, NEW YORK Thursday, Nov 1, 2018 (updated) – Iron Gate East will be hosting an opening reception for the group exhibition Love Is Not All on Saturday, November 3rd, 2018 from 5 to 8 in the evening at 230 Bishops Lane, Southampton, NY. The exhibition features works by Meghan Boody, Patti Grabel, Ryan Michael Kelly, Jeff Muhs and Richard Pasquarelli and the catalogue features a poem by Alison Powell. 

“The artists selected for the exhibition are making works that to seem to, at their very core, explore the depths, limits and complexities of our relationship, both real and imagined, to ourselves, each other, and—for lack of a better word—love.

Timeless Beauty 3, Patti Grabel 24” x 30”, Wooden spoon & pearl sculpture photographed and printed on archival paper in Plexiglass mounting

I’m thrilled to be exhibiting the work of these exceptional artists in this architecturally stunning residence. The dialogue taking place between the works in the exhibition play off of the idea of the home as both a gathering place and a place—when the party is over—for contemplation, privacy, reflection and intimacy. Our homes are where we come together, but also where we dream, alone.”

— Kelcey Edwards, Curator  

The title of the exhibition, Love Is Not All, is drawn from a poem by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and first-wave feminist Edna St. Vincent Millay in which Millay explains the inadequacy of love, beginning with:

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain 

Magie Noire (Of her dainty flesh they did devise a common feast), Meghan Boody 32” x 42” framed (edition of 8), Fuji Crystal Archive print, mounted to Dibond & face-mounted to plexiglass

However, Millay points out later in the poem that, despite love’s inability to sustain us, many a man is making friends with death...for lack of love alone.  The final lines of the poem seem to express her belief that, despite the limitations of love, she would not exchange it for a life without it. 

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution's power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.  

While there is arguably no theme more ancient and intrinsic to human history than Love, questions around what constitutes appropriate expressions of romantic love and sexual desire continue to be debated at every level of our society—from art to politics. It is fascinating to note the differences between the gendered “gaze” felt around the representations of femininity in the exhibition: from Muhs’ girdled cement torsos and Kelly’s cinematic erotic photographs, to Grabel’s photographs of a spoon suggestively cradling a pearl, and Boody’s children—magical and savage looking characters, disconcertingly presented like wild, miniature elf-queens seated at a debaucherous feast. WM