Join us for an evening of readings and performances on occasion of The Publicsfear Archive, a display featuring items from and related to the archive of the art zine Publicsfear.

The evening will feature contributions from several Publicsfear contributors, including Sean Landers, Richard Phillips, and Kerri Scharlin.

Publicsfear was founded in 1992 by Tod Lippy and art historian and writer Pamela A. Ivinski (1963–2018). Its three issues, published over the ensuing year and a half, featured artists’ projects, interviews with artists, writers, and filmmakers, and critical essays. One of a group of New York-based small-press art and culture periodicals from the early ’90s, Publicsfear’s particular editorial focus centered on anxiety-provoking issues of the period, including the (first) Iraq war, the AIDS epidemic, and growing economic disparities in the US.

Sean Landers is an American conceptual artist, best known for using his personal experience as public subject matter and for utilizing diverse styles and media in a performative manner. Through the use of painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, writing, video and audio, regardless of the medium, Landers reveals the process of artistic creation through humor and confession, gravity and pathos. Landers’ work is represented in numerous museum and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Denver Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum; Tate Modern, London; Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin; and Colección Jumex de Fundación Jumex Arte Conemporáneo, Mexico City.

Richard Phillips’ paintings engage the complex web of human obsessions to do with sexuality, politics, power, and death that are constantly exploited in mainstream media. Subjecting popular images to a range of classical painterly techniques, he estranges their familiarity and thus imbues them with new meaning. Photographic images of politicians are re-cast in neon, while supermodels are represented as academic paintings, as if to augment their status as pop icons. Over and over again throughout his work, the glossy idealism of advertising propaganda is subverted by his underlying resistance to its blatant seduction.

Recent solo museum exhibitions include Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2000); Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany (2002); “Paintings and Drawings,” Le Consortium, Dijon (2004); “Lindsay Lohan,” Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2012); and “Negation of the Universe,” Dallas Contemporary, Texas (2014). Public collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Tate Modern, London; and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

Kerri Scharlin is an American artist who has shown nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Postmasters, Wooster Gardens, Jose Freire, Kustera Tilton Gallery, and New Release in New York, as well as Schaper Sundberg Galleri, Stockholm. She was included in a three-person exhibition at David Zwirner, New York and other group shows at The Aldrich Museum of Art, Connecticut; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Galerie Herve Mikaeloff, Paris; and Momenta, 303 Gallery, and American Fine Arts, Co. in New York. She also curated the exhibition “The Big Nothing or Le Presque Rien,” at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Scharlin’s work has appeared in numerous international publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Art in America, Vogue, Artnet, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, Flash Art, and Purple.