Juror's Statement by Sarah Tanguy
It was a pleasure to serve as juror at Target Gallery. It proved to be an extraordinary experience of discovery, and I want to thank Allison Nance and Mary Cook for the opportunity as well as all of the artists who submitted proposals. The call was open to all artists whose work in all media explored current crises facing our country and the world. The response proved equally diverse, visually and thematically. Subjects ranged from financial and housing crises, botched environmental policies and government responses to Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, failed healthcare system, and the fall of the church to questionable military policy. Rather than narrow the focus, I chose 39 works that poetically express the human costs of these breakdowns.

Many of the artists emphasize the personal and the existential, like Miguel A. Aragon, Mike Celona, Anda Dubinskis, Julia Dzikiewicz, Ellen Coleman Izzo, Lillian Bayley Hoover, and Beverly Ryan. Several artists use surrogates to convey their message, including Matt Ferranto, Reginald Pointer, Rick Salafia, Charlotte Shuber, and Joel Stotts. Max Heller and Andrew Kozlowski use graphic distillations to discuss excess, while Michael G. Pino adapts a collage aesthetic to address the state of knowledge. Eric Conrad and Patrick Vincent play with art history to create haunting 21st century updates. Nathan Shulman and Christopher William White critique TV as a form of mind control, and Sim Sadler turns the mortgage crisis into a twisted computer game. Entropy as wasteland is the central subject for Jennifer Duncan, Joy Every, Sara Jones, Anthony Lazorko, Ron Longsdorf, Vu Nguyen, and Diane Tesler. Joshua E. Gagliardi, Kelly Fitzsimmons and Geoff Riggle transform everyday detritus into emblems of vanitas, while others endow new life through recycling, like Carol Cole, Miyuki Akai Cook, Jaynie Crimmins, Carrie Fucile, Erika Pochybova-Johnson, and Susan Farrar Parrish.

By turns witty and serious, the artists in Systems Failure share a deep concern for the current state of the world, while maintaining their individual emotional and conceptual perspectives.

About Sarah Tanguy
Sarah Tanguy is an independent curator and critic, as well as a curator for the Art in Embassies Program, based in Washington, DC. Recent exhibitions include “Uncommon Beauty,” “Herb White: A Taste for Art, Via Simbolica,” and “Vanishing Boundaries (a joint US/Lithuania photography exhibition).” Other projects include “Taken for Looks (an all-photography, food-inspired exhibition) and an ongoing exhibition series for the American Center for Physics. Currently, she is preparing “Mapping: Memory and Motion in Contemporary Art” scheduled for fall 2010 at the Katonah Museum of Art, New York. She is also adjunct curator for International Arts & Artists, and was associate curator of the public art collection at the new Washington Convention Center (spring 2000-winter 2002). Since 1983, Tanguy has developed over a hundred and fifty exhibitions, including “Sandy Skoglund: Enchanting the Real,” a 30-year survey of Skoglund’s food-related installations and photography, “Food Matters: Explorations in Contemporary Art,” “Off the Press: Re-contextualizing the Newspaper in Contemporary Art,” “Sweet Tooth,” “A Celebration of Women in Midlife and Beyond: Photographs by Jayne Wexler,” “Tools As Art” series at the National Building Museum, Washington, DC, and two US traveling exhibition from The Hechinger Collection. Other highlights are “The View From Here,” a joint US/Russia exhibition in all media, which premiered at the State Tretyachov Gallery in Moscow, “Landshapes” at the Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach; “Second Nature” and “New Angles: Photographs by Andrey Chezhin” at the District of Columbia Arts Center; and several outdoor and indoor sculpture exhibitions in downtown Washington, DC. In addition to numerous exhibition-related essays, she has written for The Washington Times, Sculpture, New Art Examiner, Glass, American Craft, Metalsmith, Urbanite, Hand Print Workshop International, Turning Points, Mid-Atlantic Country, Baltimore, and Readers Digest.

The daughter of a diplomat, Tanguy was born in Penang, Malaysia. She has a BA in Fine Arts from Georgetown University. While working on her an MA in Art History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, she returned to Washington, DC, as a summer intern at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Thereafter, she has worked at the National Gallery, the International Exhibitions Foundation, The Tremaine Collection, the International Sculpture Center, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, The Hechinger Collection, and the Art in Embassies