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Bound & Unbound IV

The 2017 Bound and Unbound IV international juried altered book exhibition artists.

About the Artist

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Ari Richter was born in Tampa, FL in 1983. He received a 100% debt-free public education, including a BFA from Florida State University and a MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His sculptures, drawings, videos and performances have been presented at BHQFU (New York, NY), Flux Factory (Queens, NY), The Spartanburg Art Museum (Spartanburg, SC), The Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC), CentralTrak (Dallas, TX), Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (Athens, GA), Nexus Foundation (Philadelphia, PA) Celebrate Brooklyn! (Brooklyn, NY) and MOCAtv (Los Angeles, CA). He has attended artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the University of Texas at Dallas, and has presented at the academic conference, The Way of All Flesh, in collaboration with the CUNY Graduate Center and The Morbid Anatomy Museum.
 
Ari Richter is an Associate Professor of Art at LaGuardia Community College in The City University of New York. He lives and works in Queens, NY.

Artist Statement

My parents are clinical psychologists. In my work, Sigmund Freud has become something of a personal symbol for my experience growing up. He is both parent and re-parent. He analyzes the scatological fixations that he took part in forming. The humor in this piece lies in the disconnect between Freud's seeming promise of levity (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious), and the image of his dour mug. Freud displays a recognizable feeling of exasperation. He looks like George Carlin coming down from a weeks-long cocaine binge, to the realization that he's not funny and that nobody else thinks he's funny. Humor is a tough idea to translate. Individuals' senses of humor are so subjective, that universality of expression can seem impossible. It's like we're all native speakers of our own twin language, but our sibling has been dead for decades in the woods that we just crawled out of (See movie, "Nell," 1994). This subjectivity is what gives humor its most abstract qualities. It's the very question of why we find something funny that I find the most hilarious. 

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