Curated by Eden Deering, Hope is a dangerous thing brings together a group of artworks viewed through the lens of their makers’ personal connections to and reverence for pop music. Taking its title from the final song in Lana Del Rey’s 2019 studio album Norman Fucking Rockwell!, the exhibition presents new and recent works by seven artists as individual pop personas and as a unified ensemble. Combining millennial nostalgia with an embrace of camp and melodrama, the paintings, sculptures, installations, and video on view relish their own extravagance and the embarrassment of self-invention. Like the imperfect and enigmatic pop icon herself, they are completely genuine and totally fake, extremely personal and entirely vague. Exaggerated, ambitious, and passionate, each work understands its own delusions of grandeur and yet persists because something tells us it matters. "Don't ask if I'm happy, you know that I'm not. But, at best, I can say I'm not sad. 'Cause hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have…”

On Thursday, June 12, 6-8pm, we presented a special program co-programmed with Rebecca Celli gathering writers, filmmakers, musicians, and performers in conversation with Hope is a dangerous thing. In the form of beauty queens, time-travelers, flutists, and even an anthropomorphic swan, the presenting artists pursued decadence and decay in hyper-vulnerable disguises.