WORK by MARIN CAMILLE, MICHAEL COX,
ILANA CRISPI, T. JOSEPH ENOS, NICKI ISHMAEL,
KATIE KAWAOKA, NATHAN LEVINE, and JOSH LUKE

CURATED by KATHRYN FRAZIER, NICKI ISHMAEL,
ELAINE SANTOS, and JESS WHITTLE-UTTER (2006 Participants in Mission 17’s Curatorial Internship Program)

Summer is often revered as a time of indulgent play, sanctioned hedonism, vivid experience and calculated escape. But summer is also a time of death, disarray, and displacement, bringing powerful endings before joyful beginnings. Too often the tension between these two paradigms propels us into a state of confusion, nostalgia, idealization and disappointment.

The work in Wouldn’t It be Nice examined ideas of summer through tactile, aural and visual installation, at once creating an evocative atmosphere and deconstructing its meaning. From references to such powerfully ingrained icons as The Beach Boys to the charming banality of city pigeons, the work in the show explored the relationship between the reality of summer and its representations. The pieces raised the questions: how do we reconcile the dual mandates of carpe diem and il dolce far niente? How do we parse out our own relationships to summer from the ubiquity of packaged ideas?

The title Wouldn’t It be Nice suggested that summer exists more as potential than fulfillment. As we spend hot days languishing in reverie, we are made uncomfortable by the dilemma of choosing which world to occupy: that of fantasy or of reality. The work in this show suggested that summer exists, paradoxically, between childhood memory and a day-dreamed future, between popular notions and personal experience, but never, somehow, now.