Brooklyn, NY (August 10, 2005) - Post-modern, post-apocalyptic, post-minimal, post-war, post-race, post-colonial, post-feminist, post-credible, post-historical, post-studio: these identifiers imply we are currently in a state of transition, something breaking loose from its past, pointing to the future, but not yet fully articulated. Post-Everything, the first exhibition of The Rotunda Gallery's 2005-2006 season, explores the very idea of flux in contemporary art.

Historically, new eras have begun as fragmented ideas that gain momentum, merging imperceptibly with the past to create the future. This phenomenon is heightened during times of political and economic uncertainty, resulting in often dramatic ruptures with the past. The formal principles of the Renaissance disintegrated into the instability and restlessness of Mannerism, ushering in the Baroque. Fed by a climate of unending war, social unrest, mass consumer culture, and ever-escalating technology, we are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the past and uncertain about the future. As we hover on the edge of the new, Post-Everything asks: where will our drifting lead?

From this question inevitably arise more questions. Where do we look for the new? When the democratic impulses of Duchamp have so successfully blurred the boundary between high and low brow; when there are no originals, only multitudes of copies (ironic, paradoxical, genetically modified copies) to be consumed as digestible bits of 0s and 1s, where is meaning discovered? Is it even possible to locate a common thread within a multitude of Post-Modern idiosyncratic narratives? How can you break with the formal principles of a period characterized by a lack of formal principles to yet another era devoid of principles?

Post-Everything offers no definitive answers, but creates a space in which viewers are invited to speculate for themselves, aided by a sampling of work by artists struggling to articulate a new vision of contemporary art. Claudia Hart and Graham Parker are both interested in the collective cultural subconscious that has developed out of digital technology, which enables endless precise replication but discards anything incompatible as noise. Parker exploits small technical delinquencies to empower, rather than alienate, the end user. In Spam Newspapers, he draws from a database of email spam text to print a series of newspapers filled with accidental poetry, jarring transitions and narrative fragments. Hart uses high-end digital animation to create an eerie confluence of the real and the unreal. Objects cast shadows, use perfectly defined perspective and have surface, but do not obey natural laws. Nina Katchadourian and Nicolas Lampert look to peculiar moments of intersection between the natural world and the man-made. In Animal Crossdressing, Katchadourian painstakingly "crossdresses" a snake and rat in costumes that transform one into the other. Lampert combines traditionalist landscape painting with a bricolage sensibility. The resulting meatscapes, which the artist describes as "monuments to meat," are both radical and absurd, attempting to jolt the viewer into confronting the environmental impact of our culture's industrial production of meat. George Boorujy takes a post-historical approach, inviting us to reimagine Abraham Lincoln as a vulnerable, bare-chested man. Nicole Eisenman fuses the eclectic styles of comic books, television, pornography and pop culture into a humorous installation concealing a dire social warning. In a series of educational posters that imagine the mechanics and social ramifications of New York's garbage infrastructure, The Center for Urban Pedagogy leaves us to wonder, "ultimately, what will be left, Post-Everything?" Or, as Traci Tullius' colorful banner proclaims, "Huh?"

Other artists include: Bryan Crockett, David Kramer, Justin Lieberman, Jill Miller, Jenny Perlin, Fay Ray, Hans Van Meeuwen, Ivan Witenstein and Gang Zhao.

THE ROTUNDA GALLERY, an award-winning not-for-profit exhibition space, has exhibited the work of over 2,000 artists - from Brooklyn's most exciting emerging talents to its most prominent artists. Each year, the Gallery's innovative arts education program provides services to over 9,000 New York City students. THE ROTUNDA GALLERY is a project of BRIC/BROOKLYN INFORMATION AND CULTURE, an organization founded to present cultural, educational, and informational programs that enhance the quality of life for residents of Brooklyn.