I hear it everywhere I go

Franklin Street Works's exhibition, “I hear it everywhere I go,” is a group show that explores dissatisfaction around the pursuit of the American Dream.

Curated by Franklin Street Works' creative director, Terri C Smith, the exhibition includes sculptures, texts, installations, and videos from 1995 to the present. It is on view September 16, 2017 through January 7, 2018. Exhibiting artists are: Alex Bag, Michael Blake, Nayland Blake, Jen DeNike, Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe, Rashid Johnson, Adam McEwen, Rodney McMillian, Tameka Norris, Cheryl Pope, Mikel Rouse, and Melissa Vandenberg.

The show's curatorial premise was inspired by artist Cady Noland’s (b. 1956) writings on and statements about American life. During her career in the 1980s and 90s, Noland explored the American tendency to vent violent impulses through socially acceptable release valves such as figuratively "trashing" celebrities on the one hand and conning or preying on populations outside of dominant power structures – often in the name of entrepreneurship – on the other.

The artists in "I hear it everywhere I go" exponentially expand on and add to the show's themes with strategies that include: performed fictions that resituate celebrity and commodity culture; collaborative text pieces that give institutionally marginalized voices visibility; pop culture appropriations exploring the isolation of fame; the mining of distinctly American signifiers like varsity sports and daytime TV talk shows; and juxtapositions of post-consumer objects and mass-produced materials that read on multiple levels and often indicate how people’s race, class, gender, and sexuality can position them in a simultaneous state of hypervisibility and invisibility in American culture.

“I hear it everywhere I go" aspires, emotes, dreams, mourns, carps, and converses about identities, highlighting ways expectations can be colored by unconscious efforts to acquire the perceived successes of the American Dream.

Informed by the timeline of Noland's career and the accompanying trajectory of ‘identity politics’ in contemporary art, Smith curates an intergenerational show that brings together artists of diverse histories, perspectives, and backgrounds. Their work expands on the notion of disillusionment with the American Dream and resonates to varying degrees with Critic Peter Schjeldahl's description of Noland as "the dark poet of the National Unconscious."