Installing BAR SINISTER @ Tiger Strikes Asteroid with artist Michael Macfeat!

Michael Macfeat: BAR SINISTER

Curated by Terri Saulin 

April 6 – 29, 2012

Opening Reception: Friday, April 6^th, 2012, 6-10pm

Hours:  Saturday and Sunday, 2pm-6pm and by appointment

(484)-469-0319, tigerstrikesasteroid@gmail.com

319A North 11^th Street 2H, Philadelphia, PA 19107

Michael Macfeat's prints and sculptures in Bar Sinister concern themselves with the issue of color, one through artifice and the other through the natural process of patina and entropy. They bracket the temporal extremes of twenty years of Macfeat's oeuvre. An ambiguity of meaning is apparent. Neither the sculptures nor the images are obvious but often stem from his life long love affair with reading. They rely on Macfeat's history as a bibliophile, accumulating and cultivating a compendium of quotes both visual and verbal. They become color coded strategic military maps drawn from his interest in 'Pataphysics, the Situationists and Psychogeography. Once codes are cracked and coordinates deciphered, the connection modulates between the Dialectical Materialism of the Arte Povera group and an intellectual
stroll through the arcades with the flâneurs, leisurely  walking lobsters at the end of the leash. Allow yourself ample time to savor and linger over beautifully turned words and ideas.

- Curators Note
My first contact with Michael Macfeat was back in the early 1980’s. He was invited to lecture at Moore College of Art and Design by our mutual friend Bill Walton. Mike told revolutionary tales and offered proof that it was possible to buck the system and take control of the white cube. Early in his career, Mike was busy blazing trails and creating models for DIY cooperative spaces like those cozily nestled at 319 N. 11th Street. He was curating shows and procuring alternative spaces, offering sheet rocking labor to property owners in order to show his stable of friends/artists. At a show he arranged in an empty store front on South Street, he even went as far as dressing two art handlers in white lab coats to switch paintings throughout an entire opening. This delicately choreographed action made it possible to squeeze 80 pieces into a space that would only hold 20. At a leisurely pace, the two handlers were able to change every painting in the gallery, creating an entirely different exhibition every 45 minutes. This is just one example of Macfeat’s brilliant, poetic and simultaneously hilarious approach to Culture Trade.

Presenting the work of Michael Macfeat at Tiger Strikes Asteroid is an honor and a long overdue Thank you for his inspiration and friendship.