Dennis Hollingsworth

Double Dirty Dozen at Freight + Volume

Most of the galleries here in NYC are closed for installation for the Fall season so it was a pleasant surprise to get a call from a friend to visit an opening of a group show featuring several established local artists at a gallery called Freight + Volume in Chelsea and have a beer or two afterwards. Here is a snip from the statement in their website:

When Robert Aldrich released his seminal war film in 1967 The Dirty Dozen, starring a seasoned, tough ensemble cast including Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Donald Sutherland, John Cassavettes, Jim Brown and Telly Savalas,, he created a genre not just pertinent to film but to other art forms as well. Music, writing, dance and the visual arts also have their renegades, their outcasts and outsiders, who prevail against impossible odds to find redemption through skill, cunning, madness ? and their art.

The Double Dirty Dozen (& Friends) is an exhibition about the quest for freedom of expression ? sexual, intellectual, spiritual, political - and ultimately salvation through making art. While most of the participating artists are not ex-cons, in the process of curating this unruly group I felt somewhat like the character Lee Marvin plays in the film, Major Reisman, assembling his posse of ne?er-do-wells for a suicide mission, in the face of art world establishment.