October 29 – December 12, 2014
Esber’s exhibition, “87 Ways to Kill Time”, includes samples of work from the last four decades, collapsing time by juxtaposing older and newer works based on themes and visual language rather than chronology. The show aims to provide a broader context for each work and to ask questions about how each piece connects to the culture at large and to the artist at a given age. What things evolve and what stays constant? Robert Storr describes Esber’s style of juxtaposition as a kind of “clunky elegance.” “…[B]oth the clunkiness and the elegance are the product of an imagination keyed to contradiction, and of a talent capable of calibrating the artifice to produce both effects with apparently natural unnaturalness.” (Storr, 2006) The exhibition will include a fragment from This is not a portrait, a group drawing project in which Esber enlisted a broad range of people (young and old, artists and non-artists), to translate his 2005 pen and ink drawing of Osama bin Laden. The project began in 2009 and terminated with the death of bin Laden in May, 2011.
