Lawlessness

noun

an anarchist abuse of power by fearful parties to prevent society from embracing the other quickly erases borders and establishes new ones across the globe.

At the Edge of Lawlessness is inspired by the history of Boston Corner, NY. Roughly 8 miles north of The Re Institute, Boston Corner is the tri-point where Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut meet. Before this area of land was ceded from Massachusetts to New York, the town of Mt. Washington sat west of the Taconic Mountains making it impossible to reach the law east of the state. With three railroads (New York Central’s Harlem Line, the Poughkeepsie and Eastern Railway, and the Rhinebeck and Connecticut Railroad, all now defunct) converging at the town, Mt. Washington was a hot bed of prize fights, debauchery, and criminal activity. Since its annexation to New York in 1857, this area continued to endure in isolation at the edge of lawlessness. Today, however, it seems the roles have reversed and Boston Corners serves as a refuge from the chaos engulfing the country.

Enrique Figueredo’s dynamic woodcuts, paintings, and drawings look closely at the forces and issues affecting today’s world—race, religion, immigration, power—and relates those incidents to the visual history of ancient civilizations, the colonization of the Americas, and mythology. He analyzes hardship through two lenses that are simultaneously his own: his identity being perceived as both a white man and a minority. The friction and peace he finds in polarization become the catalyst for Figueredo’s creative visual storytelling. Working through the resistance of woodcut and figurative imagery, a collision of indigenous design and colonial baroque intertwine in Figueredo’s interdisciplinary practice and self-concept. The mixed references do not lead toward a particular narrative resolution, rather they point toward a bold imagination.

This exhibition highlights an experimental interval in Figueredo’s practice. After his first solo exhibition in New York City in 2014, Figueredo abandoned the idea of a finalized edition print in pursuit of more intimate interactions with the process. By stamping figurative cutouts of Latin American and U.S. legends and iconography on painted landscapes, the work suggests that the unacquainted heroes are forced to exist in a social fantasy. In Tappan Patriots, the printed Native American figure coyly points a plastic bottle at ghostly painted patriots, adding to the contextual tension in a war between media. Figueredo‘s interest in labor intensity and the power that traditional processes can have on contemporary societies is expressed in the material and grand scale of the work.

At the Edge of Lawlessness exposes the absurd continuation of civil, religious, political, and capitalist colonial era ideologies by contemporary New World Order villains. The ephemeral and deceitful nature of cryptocurrency, the folly and persistence of big oil, the unprotected brown female body, and xenophobia are disassembled and reassembled in a futile attempt to process the new normal.

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Enrique Figueredo is a Venezuelan-American artist who immigrated from South America at an early age. He is currently a MFA candidate at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Dawn Breeze is an interdisciplinary artist living in Germantown, NY. Breeze’s work is rooted in a deep investigation of place, transformation, and ‘art as life’. Her work weaves a connection between distinct forms and disciplines through the creation of liberatory experiences; often with opportunities for creative public engagement in her work.