In Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary Crumb, cartoonist Robert Crumb’s reclusive brother Charles is asked whether medication might help him get out of the house more often. Charles answers with a question of his own: “Give me one good reason for leaving the house.”
The line gives Colin Beattie’s new exhibition at the CPW in Kingston its title and its darkly comic premise. Opening August 15 in CPW’s Community Gallery, “Give Me One Good Reason for Leaving the House” brings together 12 artists whose work examines the home as sanctuary, trap, construction site, repository of memory, and conduit for the chaos outside its walls.
“There’s a double-edged sword to the life of a shut-in,” Beattie says. “Your home looks safe and feels safe. But wouldn’t staying home all the time ultimately be kind of bad for you? The shelter offered in that exchange might actually conceal a threat.”
The exhibition began taking shape while Beattie was organizing “LIFE, STILL,” the 13-photographer group show he curated at ADS Warehouse in Newburgh last summer. One participating artist received a speeding ticket and felt she needed to “lay low” afterward. Meanwhile, Beattie was struggling to secure insurance for the exhibition. The experiences got him thinking about how much risk artists assume simply to participate in cultural life—particularly in a country where an illness, accident, or unexpected expense can derail a person’s finances.
At the same time, he encountered the work of Harry Murzyn, whose photographs documented the renovation of his home during the unraveling of his marriage. Murzyn could make an ordinary kitchen “look very ghostly and unreal,” Beattie says. The photographs suggested that the place we retreat to for protection may itself become destabilizing.
That premise expands beyond the literal household. For Beattie, the home also serves as a metaphor for the United States, a nation continually assuring its inhabitants of their security while rewriting its history to accommodate current political agendas.
“It keeps telling us that it is the safest and best place,” he says, “but it might actually be a threat. That’s the big anchor—the feeling I have of living in a country that feels maybe less and less safe to me, despite assurances to the contrary.”
Beattie, an artist and independent curator who lives in New Hamburg and keeps a studio in Poughkeepsie, arrived at that argument through the artwork. He doesn’t begin with a fixed theme and search for images that illustrate it. He maintains a database of some 400 artists, gathered through an ongoing trawl of websites, social media, and recommendations. He initially spends only 30 or 40 seconds looking at each artist, saving anything that stops him.
Once works begin accumulating, he looks for the conversations taking place among them. “I start pulling together a lot of work that, in its first stage, I don’t even know what it has to do with the other work,” he says. “Then, once I get to 10 or 11 or 12 things, I start to pull the theme out.”
In “Give Me One Good Reason,” familiar domestic spaces repeatedly slip into the uncanny. Swiss artist Sara de Brito Faustino’s The Giant, being exhibited in North America for the first time, depicts an immense human figure compressed inside a room that cannot contain her. The image will appear as an eight-by-four-foot exhibition print. Kate Steciw draws imagery from Facebook Marketplace listings, entering strangers’ homes through photographs of objects offered for sale and reworking them into collages and sculptures. Murzyn’s renovation pictures transform the labor of remaking a house into a record of a life coming apart.
The exhibition also includes work by Nando Alvarez-Perez, Henry Crawley, Robin Crookall, Danielle Ezzo, Victoria Manning, Dogwood Messer, Alicia Schirrmeister, Marin Sardy, and Kat Thompson.
Throughout the show, photography wavers between evidence and fabrication. That instability is central to Beattie’s interest in the medium. Long before generative AI made image manipulation a daily anxiety, photographs were shaping desire, directing commerce, and presenting selective versions of reality as fact. The artists in this exhibition interrupt that frictionless exchange.
“They’re gumming up or jamming the role that photographs play in the conveyance of information,” Beattie says. Their images resist the instant readability of advertising and social media, forcing viewers to slow down and notice how visual information works on them.
Beattie considers the participants artists who use cameras, with photography functioning as one tool among sculpture, collage, set construction, performance, and writing. Their work draws freely from cathedral architecture, religious painting, Surrealism, and conceptual art. What connects them is an attempt to preserve a sense of self amid a barrage of images, advertisements, political messaging, and increasingly unstable information.
“Give Me One Good Reason for Leaving the House” opens with a reception on August 15 from 3 to 5pm at CPW, 25 Dederick Street in Kingston, and remains on view through September 13. An artist talk featuring Lucas Blalock and Ray Camp follows on August 16 at Kate Steciw’s studio at the Post Office in Port Ewen. The presentation, Beattie says, will fall somewhere between a lecture and a performance—which may be reason enough to venture outside.
