Opening Reception:
May 4, 6 – 8 PM
New York

Appendix: an appendage. An adjunct to something larger or more important. Appendage: a limb of an animal or a stem on a plant. The appendage of an insect (an antenna or a leg segment) may be removed and grow back. The tails of many lizards may grow back if removed due to injury or if detached during flight from a predator. The appendix of a book is the information that does not serve the main body of the text. It grows out of the back of a book like vestigial organ. This exhibition is a small addendum to a much larger concurrent solo exhibition by Ansel Krut—a section of additional matter at the physical tail end of the gallery space.

The organ named appendix is itself vestigial. Extruded from the large intestine, this worm-like pouch serves a dubious role in maintaining gut flora, but is only noticed when it becomes inflamed. Once useful to early humans in the digestion of rough foliage, the appendix serves no measurable purpose in modern humans.

A group exhibition is a type of appendix. Each work once belonged to a larger body, but in the group show lives on as a vestige, detached from its original context. Each artwork must be trained to grow new connective tissue with adjacent objects and form a new whole. The objects in APPENDIX were chosen based on their potential to react with one another in this way.

The central artwork in APPENDIX is a 1948 canvas by Grandma Moses, titled The Trashers.It is a scene of New England farmers operating a grain thresher, and—like so many of Moses’ paintings—a story of human bodies working as a whole to reach an end result—a holiday well celebrated, a field well harvested, a destination reached safely.

Surrounding The Thrashers are artworks I like to think of as vestigial organs. Each work places an emphasis on that which is missing, or that which is to be desired. My hope is that each work forms a covalent bond not only with The Thrashers but to one another to create a sort of sapient, covalent whole like the one Grandma Moses envisaged.

— Todd von Ammon

Participating artists include: Beth Collar, Max Hooper Schneider, Shaun Krupa, Danny McDonald, Grandma Moses, Paul Pfeiffer, Holt Quentel, and Davina Semo.