Fiasco: The Art of Failure

December 6th – 20th, 2013

Frontal Lobe Gallery at Bragg’s Pie Factory

1301 Grand Avenue, Ste. 2B, Phoenix, AZ 85007

Opening Reception, Friday, December 6th 2013, 6 -10 PM

The exhibition will be open to the public on the first and third Fridays of December from 6:00PM until 10:00PM or by appointment.

According to some sources, the term fiasco was used by Venetian glass artists to refer to a blown-glass bottle, which was for some reason, a failed piece.  These bottles were sometimes kept to illustrate some flaw in form or technique. Sometimes they were thrown into a pile to be melted down to produce the inexpensive straw-covered bottles commonly used for Italian table wine.  Today we use the term to describe a complete and humiliating failure.

This will be an exhibition of failed works of art.  Artists will be asked to contribute a piece that they, for whatever reason, feel is a failure.  This is not to say that they are bad works, but rather they simply failed to live up to the hopes or expectations of the maker in some way – technical, conceptual, etc.

Failure is a regular, predictable, and we would argue, essential aspect of every artist’s creative practice.  Indeed, giving oneself the permission to fail is essential to the experimentation and risk-taking that allow the work to evolve in exciting and unexpected directions.  Unfortunately, especially for the art student, failures in the studio can feel like personal failures, and can cause the kind of apprehension and anxiety that hinders creative growth.  It is our hope that this exhibition will allow for a conversation about success, failure, and healthy studio practice, and will encourage creative individuals of every stripe to accept, embrace, and learn from the happy (and not so happy) accidents that happen every day.

Participating artists include: Elysia Michaelsen, Dannon Schroeder, Yuan Zhou, Swapna Das, Joseph Shetler, Lisa Hoffner, Danielle Godreau, Anthony Pessler, Henry Leo Schoebel, Diana Clauss, Alison Dunn, Samantha Fricano, Ed Kennefick, Dean Reynolds, Shijuan Xu, Joe Holdren, AJ Nafziger, Ellie Honl, Rossitza Todorova, Dan Lam, Shane Smith, Adam Montoya, Colleen Donohoe, Kevin Carin and Brad Konick.