Jack the Pelican Presents is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition, Jesse Bercowetz's debut of sculptural assemblages and drawings: Gentlemen, If I Had Been Able to Read and Write, I'd Have Destroyed the Human Race.

With berserk glee, Bercowetz plunges into the pell-mell of pre-politics, where nascent activism and thuggery meet. He takes his cues from the German Anti-Fa movement—skinny punk rockers who bring out the knuckles on skinheads—and Tupac Shakur. It is an in-your-face engagement with macho juvenilia, an all-out, all-over collision of images, objects and bad words.

The space of the gallery is dominated by five large sculptures, among them, a "bamboo" podium enshrouded in fog and encased in a plexiglass crystal, a totemic, flintstone-modern video surveillance tower and a merzbau-like behemoth, suggestive of a desert outpost, complete with its own fountain. They are bricolaged primarily of recycled, low-grade materials, painted black, white, brown or day-glo, and bristling with elements of drawing and collage.

Mounted on the wall or on rudimentary stick scaffolds surrounding the sculptures are further works on paper, magic-marker drawings, collages and paintings. They reference a storm of personal, political, countercultural, and art world icons, from Bowie knives to Ted Nugent to nationalistic Scandinavian Black Metal, Bas Jan Ader, militia compounds, the Bush clan and social protest movements.

Bercowetz, who describes his roots as Southern Kentucky poor, first appeared on the New York scene in 1999 with his rogue Overcoat curations. On the street, in the guise of a flasher, he exposed group shows nested in the recesses of his black trench coat. He has operated actively on the fringes of the art world ever since, in non-traditional collaborations and solo projects, ranging from MIR 2 at Smack Mellon to Happy Hostage, at Deutsch Projects in Hamburg and earlier this year, Enactments of Self at the Steirischer Herbst in Graz, Austria. His Anarchist Clubhouse, built in collaboration with urban youths, and sponsored by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, is scheduled to open this summer. Other recent venues include the New Museum, White Columns, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Franconia Sculpture Park, MN, Viper, Basel and ARCO, Spain. Artfilm, about Bercowetz’s staging of a crime scene, was screened this year at film festivals in Pennsylvania, Florida and Amsterdam. Bercowetz’s projects have been written about in the New York Times, New Yorker, Village Voice, New York Arts, New Art Examiner and Art Forum.