VICIOUS CIRCLE 

September 1st- September 24th, 2017

Opening reception: September 1st 6pm-10pm

Anytime Dept. is proud to present VICIOUS CIRCLE, a two-person exhibition from artists Thomas J. Gamble and Annie Zverina. Thomas J. Gamble is exhibiting a sampling of his ongoing project which interrogates the medium of painting and its abilities to obscure and present historical and subcultural content. Annie Zverina mines the historical archives of United States politcal history, recreating and emphasizing connections between seemingly disparate historical annecdotes through multiple media. For both of these artists, the process of collecting, distilling, and connecting various images and histories is paramount and reveals disruptions in linear understandings of dominant historical narratives.  

An Interview with Anytime Dept., Thomas J. Gamble and Annie Zverina : 

ATD: How are you feeling today? What is necessary right now? 

TJG: Fine, in the grand scheme. None the worse for wear. I don’t know if anything is necessary, but it seems  imperative to look for ways for people to understand one another or, alternately, for people to understand that  they don’t have the answers (which amounts to almost the same thing).

AZ: I feel like James Comey on June 8th when he told the Senate Intel committee he was extremely well liked.

ATD: Are you proposing an imaginary restructuring through the collection of occurrences and documents within or outside of dominant and central reality narratives?

TJG: Near the end of his poem “The Waste Land” T.S. Eliot writes; “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” I have always taken this to mean that all the pastiche and collage and appropriation of his poem, the whole huge grab-bag of literary and historical referants, is a psychic barricade against the world. The culture is in ruins but he has selected from the rubble enough stones to barricade himself in. This is resonant with me and shows in my work, the difference being I guess is that Eliot was very serious about the value (and the value of saving) the Western Tradition. I think it’s produced some nice art.

AZ: I think that the possible imaginary has been somewhat uprooted by the purposeful degradation of “central reality-narratives” from seats of power. The sinister possibilities of narrative as an encompassing force of power has endless historic precedence, but its place at the forefront of American politics today complicates the resistive potentials of counter narratives in that diversion from “central reality-narratives” has been co opted as a tool of oppression and purposeful misinformation by the President of the United States and those around him. 

I am proposing we allow for there to be tomato ketchup on the cottage cheese.

ATD: What can we do now for the realization of alternatives?

TJG: I think it’s important to be a failure. Art or music or whatever only seems to ever get really good when it’s mostly undisturbed by the broader culture for a long time. So we have to keep on. If the president is, by all accounts, a “successful” person, then the idea of being a failure is not so bad.

AZ: We have to embrace the hysterical with seriousness and rigor.

Thomas J Gamble is a visual artist who currently lives and works in the city of Erie, PA. His work references and juxtaposes history, subculture, and literature in order to create new and resistant realities in the forms of paintings, drawings, and most recently an ongoing political webcomic. He holds an MFA in Visual Studies from the Pacific College of Art in Portland, OR and has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Annie Zverina is an artist. Her work engages historical anecdotes to explore and question the resistive potentials of incoherent narratives. She holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and has exhibited internationally. Zverina currently lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts.