The Minotaur’s Daydream — Semiose Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 7 → March 4, 2023

Semiose is happy to present The Minotaur’s Daydream, an exhibition curated by Brooklyn-based artist Anthony Cudahy, which brings together the works of ten American artists, some of them presented in Paris for the first time. The artists come from different backgrounds and generations, offering the world works that testify to multiple life paths, that speak to us of migrations, of encounters with others, human or animal, of dreams and memories projected on the labyrinth’s walls. In this place that is their own, that Cudahy calls “an expansiveness outside place and time,” which we could also call their psyche, their memory, or their personal history, they work at composing and recomposing the images and signs that inhabit this place. Although infinitely personal, it can become a common ground thanks to the dialogues created by the exhibition.

“_It would be a lie if I didn’t state the past three years have existed often in a grayed familiarity, something akin to what the novelist Maria Stepanova refers to as ‘[…] the constant sense of the world as an apartment that has just been abandoned.’1 There is a paranoia inflecting the mundane and the mundane flows excessively. The mind is where I have been. Not in a present way, but in the mediation of a past before a fracture and the anxious plotting of the future. The mind is a maze full of recently-abandoned rooms that resist exit. I think of a bored minotaur, alone in his labyrinth, daydreaming. Countering that image, I recently read that birds are more creative in their songs when it’s quiet. With this meandering in mind, I attempted to curate a show which assembles a group of artists, each of whom formally and emotionally push up against walls and structures. Some adorn the walls of the maze lovingly, others astral project their way out. Stepanova also posits ‘[…] the author is the cartographer of a place [they do] not wish to return to.’2 I wonder how true this is. Across the work in this exhibition, the artists have used formal limits and conceptual frameworks to point to an expansiveness outside of place and time where the logic of entanglement leads to a freedom._”

— Anthony Cudahy

1. Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory, Trans. Sasha Dugdale (New York: New Directions, 2021),
78.
2. Ibid., 192.
_
An exhibition designed by Anthony Cudahy, artist (b. 1989 in Fort Myers, Florida, lives and works in
Brooklyn).

With:
Jenna Beasley (b. 1987 in Terre Haute, Indiana, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY);
Drew Dodge (b. 2001 in Monterey, California, lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island);
Hank Ehrenfried (b. 1992 in Short Hills, New Jersey, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY);
Aidan Koch (b. 1988 in Seattle, Washington, lives and works in Landers, California);
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982 in San Bernardino, California, lives in Los Angeles, California);
Devin N. Morris (b. 1986 in Baltimore, Maryland, lives and works in New York);
Billy Sullivan (b. 1946, in Brooklyn, NY, lives and works in New York);
Philemona Williamson (b. 1951 in New York, lives and works in Montclair, New Jersey);
Lily Wong (b. 1989 in Seattle, USA, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY);
Andersen Woof (b. 1989, in Tongling, China, lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland).