Anytime Dept. is excited to present its final exhibition in the Hoffner Lodge Gallery whistling in the dark with work by Jennifer Shear and Michael Welsh. These artists find common interest in the miscalculations of anthropocentrism and the predictive worlds of science fiction. Shear has been developing her own vernacular of image making since 2004, furiously collecting images of bodies, landscapes, cult ephemera and earthworks from sources that seem to lose their rigid dependence on context the moment she puts them to paper. Shear’s collage works exhibit fragments of past worlds and value systems, recognizable but reinvented, each image transformed in its new environment. Welsh’s work confuses notions of value and material pasts, combining provocations of non-human furniture structures and tiki bar ritualism. Welsh provokes our domestic behaviors and understanding of material purposes by altering the rules of interaction.

“Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we’re whistling in the dark too!”

–Terence McKenna    

Jennifer Shear (b. 1987 Taiwan) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She ‘s recently shown with Interstate Projects (NYC), Commune Press at Midori-So (Tokyo), Picture Room (NYC), Yale Union (Portland), and Low Rence (San Francisco).

Michael Welsh (b.1983) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He is a founding member of GWC Investigators, and editor of New World UNLTD. Welsh’s interdisciplinary works have been shown nationally at such venues as Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Essex Flowers, New York, NY  Shoot The Lobster, New York, NY; High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, CA; Printed Matter, Inc., New York, NY; American Medium, New York, NY; GCA, Brooklyn, NY; Appendix Project Space, Portland, OR; Extra Extra, Philadelphia, PA; Helper Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; C.R.E.A.M. Projects, Brooklyn, NY; BRIC Arts, Brooklyn, NY; AdHoc Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; among others. Welsh has been published in print and online by Publication Studio, Packet Bi-Weekly, Social Malpractice Publishing, Queen’s Mob Tea House and his recent book, Family was be published by maga book in January 2018.