Pier 94 | Booth 951
The Ronald Feldman Gallery will present a solo show, Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear by Nancy Chunn at The Armory Show. The exhibition is comprised of almost 300 cartoon-like paintings in a salon style installation that updates the fable of the cowardly chicken. Inspired by the panic engendered by 9/11, Chunn portrays a Kafkaesque world in which dangers seem to lurk around every corner. Chunn defines our current cultural landscape in which fears stoked by the seductive power of the broadcast media infantilize the nation.
Mapped out in 2004 as a ten-year project, Chunn organized the narrative around eleven scenes. Six of the seven completed scenes will be exhibited: The Garden (Scene I) with its host of environmental fears; The Bathroom (Scene II) with its products and accidents; The Bedroom (Scene IV) with the booby traps of the contemporary home; The Road (Scene VI) with its road rage; The ER (Scene VII) and all its chaos; and The Main Hospital (Scene VIII) where, instead of safety, she finds new fears related to the uncertainties of healthcare and special units devoted to cloning and other sinister experiments. Scenes not on display include The Kitchen (Scene III), the seventh completed scene, which is filled with disturbing kitchen appliances and food fears; The Jail (Scene V), where evil persons and dangerous products will be incarcerated; The Diner (Scene IX), centered around cultural fears, social entertainment, and food; and Poor Town (Scene X) where the poverty stricken mirror middle America’s worst fears. In four years, Chunn plans to conclude the series with Fox News (Scene XI), where Chicken Little becomes an anchor woman, co-opted into the media circus herself by a sly fox.
Chunn, whose previous works explore historical and current geopolitical scenes on well-researched topics, invents a variety of new pictorial vocabularies that provide a relationship between each subject and its presentation. For her version of Chicken Little, which is based on found images from different decades, Chunn appropriates imagery that is generated by the culture she is critiquing. The format of dozens of small canvases mimics the frame-by-frame channeling of the twenty-four hour news cycle. A narrative without text, only the pictogram "AS SEEN ON TV" appears in each scene.
Two publications are available: The exhibition catalogue from Chunn's one person exhibition, Media Madness, at the Ben Maltz Gallery at the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, 2007 - 08; and Front Pages, Chunn's diaristic drawings on the front pages of The New York Times in 1996, published by Rizzoli in 1997.
Nancy Chunn has been represented by the Feldman Gallery since 1985. Her work was included in The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2009. Chunn is a recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. She received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in 1985 and 1995 and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2005. She has been a faculty member in the BFA Fine Arts Department and Division of Continuing Education at the School of Visual Arts since 1990.
