A Warning Shouldn’t Be Pleasant

March 15 - May 11, 2007

at the WEST LA COLLEGE GALLERY
9000 Overland Ave., Culver City, CA 90230
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HIGH ENERGY CONSTRUCTS is proud to present its second off-site project, A Warning Shouldn’t Be Pleasant – a group exhibition of 23 California-based artists’ responsiveness to the end of the world. The exhibition takes its title from an essay by the poet Alice Notley. Like Notely’s subtly brash warning, the selected artists playfully and irreverently examine notions of apocalypse with hope and abandonment. Offering conceptually and metaphorically uncanny responses to a somewhat melancholic world-view-notion through a various range of media and visual languages, A Warning Shouldn’t Be Pleasant aims at evoking a series of mercurial and illuminating narratives amongst artworks, which address, embody, and explore this very current and somewhat timelessly elusive and incalculable theme. Revealing connections to belief, doubt, and politics, the artworks here hope to contribute to a larger more realistic conversation that seems to not be happening loudly nor clearly enough, concerning and/or in response to current global obsessions with cultural stasis and battle. Featured artists include: Jimmy Chertkow, Marcus Civin, Christian Cummings and Michael Decker, Todd Davis, Julie Dermansky, Nicholas Grider, Mark Hagen, Kent Hammond, Jeremiah Harrison, Doug Harvey, Marc Herbst, Gregory Michael Hernandez, Peter Herrmann, August Highland, Candice Lin, Jay Lizo, Katrin Jurati, Caroline Rankin, Greg Santos, Michael Smoler, David E. Stone, Megan Whitmarsh.

“Fake Iraq” image by Nicholas Grider
(click image to go to artist’s website)

“Save Us” post-Katrina image by Julie Dermansky
(click image to go to artist’s website)

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exhibition image (top): Peter Herrmann, “Unforeseen Effects of Global Warming On the Migratory Birds of North America,” 2007, ed. of 15.