Boys in the Band: Geoffrey Chadsey Drawings 1998-2006

The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu
December 8, 2006 – March 18, 2007

The Contemporary Museum presents the first solo museum exhibition of the drawings of New York artist Geoffrey Chadsey. Organized by TCM Associate Director/Chief Curator James Jensen, this exhibition presents a survey of Chadsey’s exotic figurative works in which he combines elements from different sources and synthesizes them into works that appear both naturalistic and surrealistic, commenting on the hybrid nature of contemporary culture.

Chadsey appropriates his imagery from art history, pop/alternative magazines, the Internet, and snapshots of family and friends. Working in watercolor pencil on vellum and Mylar, Chadsey blends fashion (both high and hip-hop) and representative images of youth culture and gay life (found via magazines and Internet sites) to create powerfully disconcerting and humorous subjects and scenes that are characterized by an off-putting sense of the familiar, yet which circumvent an identifiable personal narrative. To randomly accessed images, Chadsey mixes in the facial features of historical and contemporary public figures such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley, and Albert Einstein; heads from paintings by Gustav Klimt and Diego Velazquez; rap stars such as Snoop Dogg, Juvenile, and Xzibit; and Chadsey’s own father, brother and sisters.

Chadsey’s strength comes from his skill at seamlessly melding his disparate source material. Challenging our facility to read the signs of masculinity, femininity, race, attitude, and expression, Chadsey’s images spin a complex web of emotion and desire.

Geoffrey Chadsey was born in 1967 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received an A.B. degree in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard Universit in 1989 and an MFA degree in Photography and Drawing from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1996. He has won several awards, including the prestigious Eureka Fellowship from the Fleischhacker Foundation in San Francisco. Chadsey lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

“I draw fantasized photographs, a take on an original that is cross-bred with disparate sources to create images of androgynous, miscegenated, intergenerational fraternization. Hip-hop meets Google meets family album meets Internet chat-room. The drawings are covers and mash-ups of casual snapshots, professional portraiture, celebrity framing, and erotic posing: people performing selves for the camera and the computer. What comes out is monstrous, in Frankenstein’s sense: uncanny, an unfamiliar from familiar sources. In the past I was more concerned about rendering an image that remained photographic, convincing. Every year, I push the plasticity of the drawing further. Now, as the pencil becomes wash, the drips become prevalent, the colors more saturated, and the spaces stretched to the point where perspective starts to fail and fall flat, I am thinking more like a painter. Which is to say, the images are starting to accommodate more compositional whimsy and improvisation. It is time for things to exist on the page that do not have a direct correlate to an object seen or captured by a lens.”

Geoffrey Chadsey
2006

Mahalo
Boys in the Band: Geoffrey Chadsey Drawings 1998-2006 is organized by the The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu. In-kind support for this exhibition has been provided by Horizon Lines, LLC and ResortQuest Hawaii, formerly Aston Hotels and Resorts, with additional support for the exhibition and catalogue from Oona and Ramon Perez de Ayala.