As part of the On View series of exhibitions, in the New Work Gallery, New Museum featured photographs and paintings by Group Material, cartoonlike drawings by Jessica Diamond, and an audio-slide by Connie Hatch.

Connie Hatch: Serving the Status Quo

Through this project, photographer Connie Hatch challenged conventional notions of documentary photography and examined the relationship between representation and the politics of everyday life. The three-part audio-slide projection looked at the lives of several workers from various social classes and backgrounds. Their voices, displaced over the ruined sequence of their “stories,” reveal the anxieties created by money, exploitation, work and sexual identity formation.

Jessica Diamond: Drawings from the Helpless Peabrain series

Through spare, cartoonlike drawings, Jessica Diamond touches on the innate pathos and frailty of the human condition. Her central character, the helpless peabrain, is a seemingly mindless cipher suggesting frustration, insignificance, and loss which represent the deadening effects of mass society. Though the drawings may seem like a sardonic put-down, Diamond’s deadpan humor mizes the sad with the funny, the insightful with the banal, the universal with the everyday.

Group Material: MASS.

Group Material is a New York-based organization of artists dedicated to the creation, exhibition, and distribution of art that increases socal awareness. MASS, a traveling exhibition of over 180 images, provided a survey of art and contemporary culture in 1986 through paintings, photographs, clipped advertisements, and album covers, each 12 x 12" square. The works were arranged to spell the word MASS, and combined to question how we look at pictures.