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For Immediate Release
November 4 - December 4, 2004
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 4, 6 - 9 pm
The assistants of acclaimed artist Jeff Koons present The Gym Show, featuring the work of Travis Frazelle,Paul Jacobsen, Peter Knutson, Sacha Mobarak, Arnulfo Toro, Georgi Tushev, Ben Weiner and special guest Manny Castro.

The Gym Show probes an age-old connection between artistic conceptions of the body and the physical body of itself. Art forms a relationship between the physical body and our perception through classical Greek figurative sculpture, Boccioni's Dynamism of a Cyclist, Bruce Nauman's theoretical bodily studies and its external influences; to Knutson's seemingly machine-made body parts. The human body is the content of, the muse for, the participant in, and the hand that creates such works of art. Considering this, it is significant that what brought the artists in this show together is their position as the ìhandsî that physically actualize Koons's ideas.

The age of electronic media has seen a growing rift between the physical body and its representation. As put by art historian John Berger, ìThey used to be called physical appearances because they belonged to solid bodies. Now appearances are volatile.

Technological innovation has made it easy to separate the apparent from the existentî. In the media, disembodied images are everywhere, motivating us to purchase everything from food to beauty products. Jacobsen and Weiner respectively celebrate and mourn the vacuousness of such imagery in their otherworldly depictions of ephemera, while Frazelle's collage paintings satirize sentimental notions of images with such a distant relationship to the real.

In today's gym institution, the apparent reconnects with the existent of the synthetic image of a strong, healthy, beautiful body motivating people to lift weights and pump away on stairmasters. The body and its representation may recombine in new ways, resulting in mutations. For instance, the fictional action hero has a real-life manifestation in body builders, a transformation that Toro's painted cutouts invite us to experience. Meanwhile, Castro's triptych of transsexual phenomenon Amanda Lepore celebrates the physical realization of one's identity through surgical means, and inversely, Mobarak's painting of an obese woman imports a sense of being isolated within one's own physical form. Such an interchange lies at the crossroads of our culture's technological, artistic, and commercial innovations, and such is the terrain of this show.