Jonathan VanDyke, "The Painter of the Hole"

The show's title comes from a series of surrealistic canvases completed just after World War II by George Grosz, the famously scabrous Weimar artist who left Nazi Germany for America in 1933. They depict an artist at his easel surrounded by a blasted landscape, rendering the same image of a hole over and over while remaining oblivious to the devastation. VanDyke likewise alludes to the apparent disconnect between contemporary art and events such as the war in Afghanistan. The works here are actually stitched together out of the remnants of a performance, in which a pair of dancers wrestled each other while wearing outfits that dripped pigment as they rolled around, putting a violent spin on the idea of action painting.