Fruit Bowl Manifesto
A Fruit Bowl Manifesto, features the work of Andrew Cornell Robinson who has collaborated with a dozen different artists, designers, musicians, and poets whose inspiration comes from an inherent sense of play, a distinct sense of humor, the dangerous, poetic, rebellious and at times the absurd.
Robinson explores discordant assemblages of personality, memory and history through craft. The work is comprised of a ceremonial series of reliquaries, grottos, artifacts, photographs and agitprop from the personal to the poetic. Inspired by radical events loosely informed by memory and reimagined through the proxy of two personae based on historical and fictional characters that include Madame Thérèse Defarge, the villainess in Charles Dicken's novel A Tale of Two Cities, Stilitano, the object of affection in The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet and the French revolutionary Jean Paul Marat and his assassin Charlotte Corday. In contrast to Jacque-Louis David's celebrated painting, Death of Marat, Robinson has combined historical and fictional narratives with his own memories of an activist past as a departure point to reimagine memory through independent works and creative collaborations with a jazz composer, a master print maker, a costume designer, a poet, a product designer and many others. Each of these collaborations began with a conversation about a reimagined persona. Robinson and company then worked together to create artifacts, ideas, sounds and garments to represent these characters. The resulting queer things are not easily defined. Robinson has sought out fringe storylines, and diaristic visual fragments, attempting to pass as artifacts and heirlooms, ideas and agitprop as aesthetic signs and stories. ... This exhibition is made possible by the Arts + Crafts Research Studio and, in part by support from the New School through a Research and Creative Practice Grant. Participation, inspiration, collaboration and thanks to the following: Greg Climer, Paul D’Agostino, Richard Darlington, Jeffrey Goldstein, Sigfrido Holguin, Michael Kirk, Elias Paulson, Alex Reyes, Sarah Bonham Robinson, Renée Rockoff, Spike, Brett Sroka, Christopher Stout, Patty Suarez, and Steve Turtell.
