Some Nights When Nothing Happens Curated by Kristopher Benedict.
Featuring Jacke Gendel, Peter LaBier, Halsey Rodman, and Kristopher Benedict
“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
As much as the crowd holds an allure, there may be a greater draw towards quiet places and smaller communities. We are all attracted to the uncommon and the obscure, to that band that no one in your town has heard of yet. The artists of “Some Nights When Nothing Happens” find a common ground in that movement away from popular taste, as they look for meaning in overlooked models and idiosyncratic histories.
“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
This apocryphal Yogi-berra-ism more likely first saw print in a short story by John McNulty titled “Some Nights When Nothing Happens Are The Best Nights in This Place”, first published in the New Yorker Magazine in 1943.
The symbolic space of our exhibition is the Bowery bar that provides the setting of McNulty’s story, a mellow pub full of regulars on a late weekday night / early morning in December. The conversational atmosphere allows the author to range across a multitude of themes: a cost-benefit analysis of the peaceable atmosphere of an empty pub as opposed to one that is packed with paying customers, the difficulties of learning the Chinese language, whether or not the sour beer artist, who is employed only once a year ought to receive a holiday gratuity for his services, the dangers of riding a train on Christmas Eve with a drunk...”
Similarly, the work featured here shares no single declarative sentiment but aims to involve the audience in a less formal dialogue between the art works on display and between the diverse practices of the artists who created them. In an open way, “Some Nights When Nothing Happens” talks about the perceptions, affinities, personalities, and stories shared between these artists.
