Road Agent is pleased to announce Far From the Madding Crowd, a group exhibition opening this Saturday, March 7, and running through April 18, 2009. It features work by Rebecca Carter, Celia Eberle, Thomas Feulmer, Margaret Meehan, Julian Opie, Stephen Park, Richard Patterson, Dan Perfect, George Quartz, Giles Ripley, Kevin Todora, and Erik Tosten.

Playing on the title and conceits of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel, the exhibition explores the dislocation of self, both geographically and psychologically—as it were the costs and benefits of leaving the familiar behind. In the weeks leading up to its opening we’ve referred to the exhibition as “the tweaked-out landscape show”, and we’ve meant that in both a humble and sinister way, as the world we know crumbles around us and people struggle to find their place, their different selves, in unfamiliar territory.

To that end, artists both veteran and new have a way with disenfranchisement, cynicism, irony, and silver linings, and the characters and environments making up the exhibition illustrate a staggering range of emotion: sluggish but emerging self-awareness, burning forests, moonscape isolation, rural tranquility, defaced banality, fantastically armored nature, pierced classicism, and one angry bunny …. To that end, artists both veteran and new have a way with disenfranchisement, cynicism, irony, and silver linings, and the characters and environments making up the exhibition illustrate a staggering range of emotion: sluggish but emerging self-awareness, burning forests, moonscape isolation, rural tranquility, defaced banality, fantastically armored nature, pierced classicism, and one angry bunny ….