PRESS RELEASE

I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.

– Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

Greene House Gallery is honored to present At The Rot, an exhibition of new works by Brooklyn based artist collaborative, A / A / C. At The Rot opens on Saturday, October 28, 2023 and remains on view through November 18, 2023.

A / A / C engages in the exaggerated theatrical performance and melodrama of camp through an earnest examination of materiality and presentation. Effectively balancing absurdist comedy with brutal violence, the forty-two works displayed throughout the space present as a cabinet of curiosities; trophies collected and reprised for spectacle. The collaborative engages in Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—in an invitation for their audience to arrive in costume. Through clinical lighting, a pungent scent of latex and a deep investigation into the act of making, At The Rot conjures an atmosphere of alien invasions, mad scientists, chemical accidents, and experiments gone wrong.

The material qualities found throughout A / A / C’s new body of work are akin to the make-up special effects and explicit gore which emerged within the horror genre in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A conglomeration of surgical lubricant, acrylic coating, clay, derma wax, latex, gel gloss, and stage blood materialize into scabs and orifices that protrude from their substrates. Related to the venereal appetite of the body horror subgenre of North American films and early Gothic literature, the collaborative pair intuitively responds to their materials with a near loss of conscious control. The resulting works conjure unnatural or violent distortions of the human body that play upon our anxieties of physical vulnerability.

Adam Ames (BA 1991 University of Pennsylvania, General Studies in Photography 1993 International Center of Photography, MFA 1997 School of Visual Arts) is an artist and teacher based in Brooklyn, NY. In 1998, Ames began working with Andrew Bordwin as the collaborative Type A; the duo worked together through 2021. Ames and Type A have exhibited extensively including such institutions as MCA Denver (Denver, CO), The Indianapolis Museum of Art (Indianapolis, IN), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT), The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (Saratoga Springs, NY), The DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum (Lincoln, MA), The Luckman Fine Art Complex at California State University (Los Angeles, CA), The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), Art in General (New York, NY), The Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover, MA), The List Visual Arts Center at MIT (Cambridge, MA), ICA Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA), Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans, LA), Institute of Contemporary Art (Palm Beach, FL), UCLA Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA) and The Johnson Museum at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater (New York, NY) The Parrish Art Museum (Southampton, NY) in addition to many galleries. Ames teaches at Parsons School of Design.

Anthony Caruso (BFA 2021 The New School) is a playwright, director, visual artist and teacher based in New York, NY. His writing and directing training include The Barrow Group, T. Schreiber Studios, and The Tisch School of the Arts. In 2019, Caruso co-founded PocketBear Productions, a production collaborative for theatre-video-audio open to actors, writers, directors, makers of all ages, disciplines and experiences.

A / A / C began collaborating in the summer of 2021. Originally planning to work as co-playwrights, the duo quickly branched out into visual language. They work in a variety of media to explore their personal histories and oddly linked trauma. 

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