Street Berserker
curated by Tanner MacArthur
May 16 — June 30, 2025
Opening Reception, Friday, May 16 from 6pm - 8pm

Robert Rauschenberg once said something about a picture being more like the real world when it is made out of the real world. The artists in Street Berserker took his advice in stride. They gather the real world in their bookbags and hatchbacks and redeploy it as necessary to reconfigure and reimagine their realities.

Each’s compulsive practice maps a survival strategy within the modern cosmopolitan hellscape. Imagine an alternative myth of Sisyphus in which he was forced to post on @gangculture every day; instead of being vanquished by a boulder, he was done in by the frustration of never knowing how many people watched his Instagram story. There’s waste and chaos everywhere, and all that disorder begs him to find meaning. So he gets his ass out of bed each day to spin the excess scrap that haunts the planet into a story of salvation…or maybe salvage-tion. It’s a story of material redemption by way of physical exertion and persistence. A modern Sisyphean ordeal.

In ancient Scandinavia, a berserker is said to have fought with mad rage on the battlefield, but perhaps only because he ate hallucinogenic mushrooms beforehand. His name came from an affinity for bearskin armor (björn: bear; serk: shirt, from the Icelandic tongue.) Our Berserkers sold that bearskin on Depop and bought hi-vi vests to boot (the artist Banksy tells us it helps to blend in to the urban surrounds). The new battlefields are alley dumpsters off Fifth Avenue or the Craigslist Free Page. And mushrooms? Well, yeah, they might be in order, too.

The thing about street material is that it's as real as you want it to be. The brain’s selective attention mechanism probably doesn’t want to keep noticing cardboard waste or broken tail-light fragments, but this crew just can’t stop transforming old crap. It’s absolutely obliged–the oversupply, the residue, the glut. But oh is it satisfying alchemy to turn rust into redemption. 

Artists:

Jodi Hays
Nick Jaskey
Thomas Macie
Tanner MacArthur
Alan A. Peralta Martinez
Zander Raymond
Julie Schenkelberg