NOTHING RITUALLY
DEREK G. LARSON + MARC MITCHELL

AUGUST 13 - SEPTEMBER 10
RECEPTION: AUGUST 13, 6-9PM

GRIN is pleased to present Nothing Ritually, an interdisciplinary exhibition by Derek G. Larson and Marc Mitchell. In keeping with previous projects this fourth and most truly collaborative effort follows a select data set to define and develop the work. This process follows a script the artists have titled Dazzle Ships, a seven act play without actors; which groupings of paintings, video and objects embody characters from American plays. Visitors receive a playbill with the order of appearance for each act and background information on playwrights and plot.

DAZZLE SHIPS
Act 1: Alms for the Middle Class by Stoo Hample
Act 2: Giants Have Us In Their Books by José Rivera
Act 3: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Edward Albee
Act 4: Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage by Jane Martin
Act 5: Arborophilia by Jacob M. Appel
Act 6: The Folly of Others by Neith Boyce
Act 7: The Finger of God by Percival Wilde

Borrowing language from both war-time diversion tactics and eloquent writers, Nothing Ritually functions as a vehicle for the two artists to relay their sentiments about the current political and economic climate. The selected plays, each by lesser-known by 20th century American Playwrights that tell a story of economic tragedy, lend their titles to the individual acts in Dazzle Ships, which in turn choreographs the viewer’s movements through the exhibition.  The cyclical nature of success and failure through history and to present day is at the heart of this exhibition.

Derek G. Larson received his MFA from the Yale School of Art and has participated in a number of national and international exhibitions and residencies. Recent shows include the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Human Resources Los Angeles and POWRPLNT Brooklyn. In 2013 he published an online exhibit with Big Red & Shiny in Boston and was a finalist for the Hudgens Prize in Atlanta. In 2014 he received the SECAC Fellowship Award and the David Bermant Foundation Fellowship. He teaches in the Summer Studio Program at VCU and has been featured in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, NY Arts Magazine and New American Paintings.
dereklarson.net

Marc Mitchell received his MFA from Boston University and has participated in a number of exhibitions at institutions such as G.A.S.P Gallery, Boston; Denise Bibro Gallery, New York; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of Massachusetts, Boston; and Laconia Gallery, Boston. Over the past 10 years, he has overseen exhibitions that feature artists such as Josef Albers, Louise Bourgeois, Emmet Gowin, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Longo, Sam Messer, Allan McCollum, Richard Misrach, Thomas Nozkowski, Fred Sandback, and many others. In 2014 his work was selected for New American Paintings and he is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and the Director of Exhibitions at the University of Arkansas.
mmitchellpainting.net

REFERENCES:
Edward Franklin Albee III (born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). His works are often considered as well-crafted, realistic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricality and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continues to experiment in works such as The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002).

Jacob M. Appel (born February 21, 1973) is an American author, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic. He is best known for his short stories, his work as a playwright, and his writing in the fields of reproductive ethics, organ donation, neuroethics and euthanasia.[1] Appel's novel The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up won the Dundee International Book Prize in 2012.

Dazzle camouflage, also known as razzle dazzle (USA) or dazzle painting, was a family of ship camouflage used extensively in World War I, and to a lesser extent in World War II and afterwards. Credited to the British marine artist Norman Wilkinson, though with a rejected prior claim by the zoologist John Graham Kerr, it consisted of complex patterns of geometric shapes in contrasting colors, interrupting and intersecting each other.

Dazzle Ships is the fourth album by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), released in 1983. The title and cover art (designed by Peter Saville) alluded to a painting by Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth based on dazzle camouflage. The painting, Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool, is in the collection of the National Art Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Canada.

Stuart E. Hample (January 6, 1926 – September 19, 2010), also known as Stoo Hample, was an American children's book author, performer, playwright and cartoonist who sometimes used the pseudonyms Joe Marthen and Turner Brown, Jr. He is best known for the books Children's Letters to God and The Silly Book, and the comic strip Inside Woody Allen.

Neith Boyce Hapgood (March 21, 1872 – December 2, 1951) was a United States novelist and playwright. She married Hutchins Hapgood on June 22, 1899. Together with Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, and others, they founded the Provincetown Players.

Jane Martin is the pen name of a playwright who has been active from 1981 to the present, whose real identity remains unknown. Martin's plays include Anton in Show Business, Back Story, Beauty, Coup, Cementville, Criminal Hearts, Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage, Vital Signs, and Talking With...[1] Martin's Keely and Du won the 1994 American Theater Critics Association New Play Award and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

José Rivera (born March 24, 1955) is a playwright and the first Puerto Rican screenwriter to be nominated for an Oscar. Many of his plays have been produced across the nation and even translated into several languages, including: The House of Ramon Iglesias, Cloud Tectonics, The Street of the Sun, Sonnets for an Old Century, Sueño, Giants Have Us in Their Books, References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot and Adoration of the Old Woman. In 2003, Cloud Tectonics was presented in the XLII Festival of Puerto Rican Theater, an event sponsored by the Puerto Rican Institute of Culture, in San Juan. Rivera helped found the Los Angeles-based theater company, The Wilton Project.

Edward Alexander Wadsworth (29 October 1889 – 21 June 1949) was an English artist, most famous for his close association with Vorticism. He painted, often in tempera, coastal views, abstracts, portraits and still-life. He was also an engraver on wood and copper. In the First World War he was involved in transferring dazzle camouflage designs onto ships for the Royal Navy, and after the war he continued to paint nautical themes.

Percival Wilde (March 1, 1887 – September 19, 1953) was an American author and playwright who wrote novels and numerous short stories and one-act plays. He also authored a textbook on the theater arts. Native to New York City, Wilde graduated from Columbia University in 1906, and worked for a time as a banker. He began writing plays in 1912.

Norman Wilkinson (24 November 1878 – 31 May 1971) was a British artist who usually worked in oils,watercolors and drypoint. He was primarily a marine painter, but he was also an illustrator, poster artist, and wartime camoufleur. Wilkinson invented "Dazzle Painting" to protect merchant shipping during World War I.