We feel content and safe within the confines of the world we understand. Tease intends to poke holes, cut into, and fragment the perceptual matrix that is our world; daring the viewer to imagine existential possibilities beyond the familiar and the ordinary. Tease is a populated space, a universe of hybrid bodies and masked and secret things existing at the very edges of our daily lives.
The realities described by drawings, collages and sculptures in Tease are only imaginable through access to terrifying and exhilarating knowledge-knowledge we gain by prying open the locked closet, gazing into the dark sky, chanting a ritual song, or opening closed windows of the mind.
With familiar objects such as children's toys, kitchen utensils, bed sheets, rugs, and other common household items, Tease probes our fear of the unknown and the hidden, and tickles the pleasure of revelation. It asks the question: to what extent does the acquisition of more knowledge contribute to the (un-)making of the human? What is the existential value of curiosity, that primal urge to peer into the unknown? What desires are fulfilled or lost in encounters with partially obscured images and objects on the verge of disappearance/recovery?
Tease is a place of possibility, a space of becoming; it is an unsettling, off-kilter space, not unlike the world outside. It is at the moment of our greatest discomfort when we are compelled to ask the most important questions about our lives, and our world.
Tease is that place.
-Marcia Kure
Born in Nigeria, Marcia Kure has appeared in museum and gallery exhibitions in Nigeria, Germany, the United States, Spain, the Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Japan, Canada, Austria, and Switzerland. Most recently the work was featured at the Palais de Tokyo in the Paris Triennial 2012; "The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti" at The New Museum, NYC; The 7th Sharjah Biennale; and the 2nd Seville International Biennial curated by Okwui Enwezor. Reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the New York Observer, Time Out, Frieze, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, African Arts and Flash Art among others. The work will be exhibited next in a three person exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City in the Fall.
