Chris Bors, Sandi Petrie, David Poolman and Jennifer Reeder

Everything Bad is Good For You, November 2014 

This November, Grizzly Grizzly invites you to examine guilty pleasures in ‘Everything Bad is Good for You’, a dynamic group exhibition featuring Chris Bors, Sandi Petrie, David Poolman and a new film by Jennifer Reeder. Beautifully rendered Doritos, a knitted tableau of domestic indifference, paint-by-number punk rock paintings, and a coming of age film set the score of 80s heavy metal anthems: the work in ‘Everything Bad is Good for You’ repurposes consumable culture, building a space for uncomfortable nostalgia and social rebellion.
 
The meticulous paintings of New York-based artist Chris Bors are complex mash-ups of punk band logos, children’s activity books, website graphics and vintage magazines. Sparsely composed, the graphic paintings play “on the confrontation of violence and solidarity as expressed in a music genre that has roots based on a struggle for social justice.” 

Philadelphia artist, Sandi Petrie’s soft sculpture installation, ‘Mom’s Too Busy’, is colorful and playful but also flaccid and melancholy. Her knitted work recreates quotidian artifacts–beer cans, an ashtray, a TV – to examine shared constructs of normalcy and success.  According to the artist, these uneasy works are still infused with hope in a reality in which “growing up is not synonymous with surrender.” 

David Poolman, a Toronto-based artist, presents a series of small drawings from his book 36 Doritos.  The lovingly observed graphite-on-paper drawings undermine our quick consumption, finding beauty in the strange topography of this familiar snack.

Continuously screening during the exhibition is Indiana-based Jennifer Reeder’s powerful new short film A MILLION MILES AWAY “a super-natural coming of age film… that unravels patiently to the infectious beat of 80s era anthem…rearranged as lamentation.”