Leidy Churchman, Claudette Gacuti, Thomas Hirschhorn, Arthur Jafa, Jacob Kassay,
Marc Kokopeli, Matthew Langan-Peck, Louise Lawler, Rodney McMillian, R.H. Quaytman,
Jessi Reaves, Raphaela Simon, Akeem Smith, SoiL Thornton, Uman, Stewart Uoo

OPENING JULY 1
5-9 PM

UNCLEBROTHER@UNCLEBROTHER.ORG
@THEREALUNCLEBROTHER

I first saw Stephen Shore’s seminal photography book ‘American Surfaces’ during my senior year of high school at a bookstore in rural Pennsylvania where I grew up. An area not far from, and not unlike, Hancock, New York. Hundreds of photographs that the artist snapped while driving around the United States in the early 1970s felt familiar in a previously unexperienced way. Looking at some pictures literally framed through the window of a speeding car, it was the first time that I identified with art as an appendage of a life lived rather than the determined production towards some masterful thing. Images contradict one another page after page as if captured by multiple photographers with varying perspectives of the world churning around them. The book provides no answers but rather exposes new personalities and upends its own viewpoint with every stop. An embrace of uncertainty becomes a timeless record of the moment of production. In a similar way, this group exhibition, Customs Cars Cultures, brings together a range of textures from the brutally rough to the deceivingly smooth that tell a full yet unfolding story about today’s world. During a time when we can all take ‘road-trips’ by simply scrolling down the virtual routes on our phones, the physicality of objects feels urgent in the face of digital mementos. Working with a wide variety of mediums and materials, the artists that compose this intergenerational group all make art that allow the viewer to question alongside them. If this exhibition is anything like a recent road-trip, then the works are the sites, experiences, and conversations that I can’t stop thinking about.

– Kyle Thurman, 2023