COMMON AREA
Ruslan Khais and Theodore A. Harris. Philosophical Underpinnings (Common Area series), assemblage, acrylic on paper, oil, color pencil, spray paint, and paper on canvas, 2018.
The Common Area series by Ruslan Khais and Theodore Harris ...
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... is an attempt to create new works from old works, spray painted with a layer of art speak, to inflate the sometimes flat tire of art talk with new air to see where it will go.
We are looking beneath the surface politics of aesthetics and formalism, to ask in visual language, what are the Philosophical Underpinnings of the Evilly Sufficient colonial slave trade, still with us today in the form of the prison industrial complex. Harris closely examined this thematic in terms of art criticism through his previous Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Formalism series. He continues the conversation here through Common Area with Ruslan Khais. Together, they discuss the merits and dangers of formalism through a visual enmeshment of fine art and the visual language of social critique. In essence, this series grapples with the following--without content, formalism functions as the cosmetics of art criticism like aluminum siding on a slumlord’s property. --Ruslan Khais and Theodore A. Harris |
Ruslan Khais and Theodore A. Harris, Evilly Sufficient, (Common Area series), assemblage, paper collage, acrylic on paper, spray paint, AK-47 Bayonet, 2018.
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