Alyse Emdur typically photographs such pursuit-of-happiness-in-American-culture subjects as lottery winners receiving their checks and meetings of Optimist Clubs. She has invited therapy dog teams and girl scout cookie sellers into the gallery. In “No Apology for Breathing,” she presents her Portable Roll-up Hopscotch Floor Mat. Hopscotch was a popular street game in the 1930s. It originated as a Roman youth-initiation ceremony. —Roll it up and take it anywhere.

Out of papier-mâché, Valerie Hegarty creates an apple tree branch breaking through the gallery wall. Pigeons scavenge the unpicked fruit. In the 1930s, Williamsburg immigrants grew and picked their own fruit and WPA murals depicted plentiful harvest scenes. In contrast, WPA photographers documented the grim lives of farm workers and former businessmen sold apples on street corners during the Depression. Untitled (Apple Tree Branch) embodies the American promise of self-sufficiency and abundance along with its failure and decay.



Sophia Naess, Dental Plan, 2005

In “No Apology,” David Harrison Horton, who teaches English in Nan Jing, China, continues his exploration of pictographic communication. He paints hobo signs on top of Chinese student paintings.

Julian LaVerdiere, Continuous Profile (of George W. Bush) —after Renato Bertelli's 1933 Continuous Profile of Mussolini

Text and photographs from James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are reference points for Lucy Raven’s duo of videos, A Crisis Passed in Sleep and When the Ceiling Has Become Visible. In both, she uses small movements to chart the exhausting and persistent continuum of sleep and work.

James Merle Thomas, a graduate student in the Cultural Studies and German Departments at the University of Pittsburgh, focuses on the intersection between literature, history and the visual arts. His interactive sound sculpture Crystal Set in this exhibition references the connections between Depression-era radio culture and the literal and imagined landscapes of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The Dream of Halliburton Man
Laurence Gipe derives the central portraits in his large-scale, multi-media banners Halliburton Girl and The Dream of Halliburton Man, both 2005, from downloadable "motivational" pdf files on the Halliburton corporation's website. These large-scale banners address the non-hierarchical nature of totalitarian and "worker motivational" rhetoric (Cold War Soviet, Nazi, WPA).

In Aaron Wexler’s paintings, life, thought and creativity grow from ‘common weeds,’ as though to say, “Even in the darkest of places, there is beauty.”

Letha Wilson passes a sculptural extrusion between two photographs—the 295 Driggs Avenue multi-story housing development and a couple sitting in Father Popieluszko Square, both in Williamsburg. As with other works in her Extrusion series, a shape within the photograph is the starting point. Here, she melds two images to produce a third, formal hybrid that ponders the future of Williamsburg-Greenpoint housing and the contemporary family unit.

Seth Cameron, Barry and Lisa (Emma Goldman), 2005, oil on canvas. Cameron is a member of the art collective SALT and the Director at the LMCC.