October 2 - November 2 | Opening : October 2, 5-8pm
Pace Taylor The Bodybuilder, 2021
La Loma Projects is pleased to announce GOALS, an exhibition featuring work by Meegan Barnes, Nadjib Benali, Gary Clement, John Collins, Shaun Ellison, Marc Etherington, Salomon Huerta, Aaron Jones, Evan Jones, Kelly Lynn Jones, Brian Lotti, Devin Morrison, Faye Sanders, Jake Sheiner, Pace Taylor, and Liz Walsh.
GOALS brings together artists whose works investigate sport, games, and play. We can jeer at the commercialism of professional sports, but our fields, courts, racetracks, rings, and pools are nevertheless home to true acts of beauty, strength, and style, stages of communal identity, the limits and glories of the body, collaborative and individual work, euphoria and despair, real and implied violence. Globally and at home, sports absorb and reflect the darkest strains in our politics, shadow-plays of nationalism and tribalism.
“Sports” dramatize play, but they are not play. Play is not for consumption and, in a technocratic society, serves no discernible function. What does it do? One could ask the same thing about poetry, music, or painting, and come up with the same answer: these forms lend color and meaning to our lives.
Whether in floodlit arenas or on the humble neighborhood court, bounded by finish lines or chain-link fences, refereed, photo-finished, booed and cheered, the theater of sport is not merely a healthy distraction from life and its chaos, but an essential expression of our nature.
