Ballroom Marfa presented You Are Here curated by Fairfax Dorn, its first group exhibition devoted to emerging artists whose work is informed by their experience of urban and suburban life in contemporary American culture.

Through the visions of SunTek Chung, Larry Bamburg, Deborah Grant, Andrew Guenther, Hilary Harnischfeger, Adam Helms, Matthew Day Jackson, Karyn Olivier, Sigrid Sandstrom, Allison Smith, Ian Sullivan, Will Villalongo, Roger White, Raphael Zollinger, and an exhibition essay by Mary Robbins, this exhibition seeks to address a collective and individual response to a particular moment in time: artists as social and cultural cartographers.

The artists illustrate the spectrum of actual and emotional locations that create an ideological map of where we are now. They represent all locations both narrative and symbolic; the dream world, paranoid conformity, urban claustrophobia, suburban alienation, ephemeral monuments, propaganda, anonymous intimacy, and finally the reinvention of the American frontier.

Each artist creates a vocabulary, which addresses their perspective on contemporary society. Moving away from the postmodern tradition, a new generation of artists are employing a corporeal approach, which results in visually narrative and hyper-illustrative work. These new artists evoke urgency and compassion, evidence that the artist is both present and directly involved with the work; each artist in this group exhibition was felt as an individual.

On Friday, October 7th, DJ Bowflexx and Vapocrunch gave a live performance, which in their own words, will incorporate a crystal ball of American Chaotic Idiotic TV Culture, adorned with monumental banners of suburban self-indulgence and humorous representations of the land and the people beyond the peephole.

On Saturday, October 8th, during the Chinati Foundation’s annual Open House, Ballroom Marfa, the Chinati Foundation, and Charles Attal presented a free concert by the legendary Yo La Tengo at the Thunderbird Hotel in Marfa. For the past eighteen years, the members of YLT (Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew) have been making eclectic, adventurous music that ranges freely between genres and styles.

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