Kavi Gupta is proud to present Adult Contemporary – Dirty Black Summer, a diptych screening of film and video works spanning from the mid-nineties to the present. Created with a siamese approach that interposes the renowned musical genre typified by Barry Manilow or Olivia Newton-John with ”Dirty Black Summer”, a song from metal crooner Glenn Danzig’s album, How The Gods Kill (1992). Taken together the videos confuse genre to question how viewers perceive aesthetic category and distinguish specific forms. Each work represents this dilemma inherent in the double title; whether it is the ultra-gratuitous raw snuff of Los Angeles artist Julian Hoeber’s Killing Friends (2001), where a teen slowly murders his friends or Landon Wigg’s Riot On The Unset Trip (2010), a cropped appropriation of Mimsy Farmer’s freakout in exploitation classic Riot On The Sunset Strip (1967), the works appear just as sordid, self-interested, and dramatic as they are modest, populist and subliminal.
Adult Contemporary – Dirty Black Summer was organized by James Krone and Marc LeBlanc with special thanks to Blum & Poe, Patrick Painter Inc. and John Knuth. All videos come courtesy of the artists and their representative galleries.