EaF_3, Mumbo’s Outfit, New York, NY
April 28 – May 28, 2016
“These paintings are appropriated from two photographs taken of the attendees of a funeral, sitting in the pews of a church, looking forward. The back of one print has “1950 Mother’s Funeral” written in cursive in the top left corner. In this long-term series of paintings, each member of the crowd (well over a hundred) is to be rendered their own individual portrait. The viewers are turned into the subjects.
When my great uncle died, an extended member of the family on his side showed up for the funeral, representing her entire immediate family. During the viewing, she went up to the casket and took a loud, bright flash picture of him to bring home to her relatives who couldn’t travel. My family members were scandalized; unspoken etiquette was broken. A sculpture with one intended viewing. I think of the washed-out image being taken, developed, shared, and then extending that funerary moment.”
-Anthony Cudahy
Mumbo’s Outfit is eager to present EaF_3, the premiere iteration of a new series of paintings by Anthony Cudahy. EaF_3 stands for “Everyone at the Funeral,” a project Cudahy is attempting for the third time and exhibiting for the first time.
The EaF_3 paintings play in the murky parlor where definitions of subject and object are upended in favor of sustained looking. Recomposition follows decomposition as opaque histories isolated and congealed within a camera’s viewfinder dissolve into rendered specters of the mind; the anonymous faces become familiar characters and the tension between the singular and the collective is brought to the fore in its many permutations. Cudahy’s process is one of translating imagery, trafficking meanings from past narratives to present quagmires of individuality and distribution.
Photography: Mumbo’s Outfit