Jester’s Privilege 

Arnold’s

Park & Mulberry, Baltimore

Saturday, July 29th

6-10 P.M.

Artists: Budd, Chong, Kelso, Huey, Maurice, Nic, Portia, & Riddles

Maurice is pleased to present Jester’s Privilege, an exhibition of degenerate hubris featuring seven artists emphatically declaring their brazen nonexistence; elevating their artistic milieu in simultaneous irreverence and higher, spiritual essentiality. The artists featured in this exhibition share a desire to transcend their fictional obsolescence into the temporal,  purgatorial realm of Arnold’s, an abandoned lawyer’s office-turned studio/exhibition center.

In the film, Being There (1979), Peter Sellers plays Chauncey,  a gardener who has resided in the Washington D.C. townhouse of his wealthy employer for his entire life, and educated solely through television, is forced to vacate his home when his boss dies. While wandering the streets, he encounters business mogul Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas), who assumes Chauncey to be a fellow upper-class gentleman. Soon, Chauncey  is ushered into high society, and his unaffected gardening wisdom makes him the talk of the town. Chauncey inadvertently becomes a political advisor to the President of the United States through his Haiku-esque soundbites about gardening that are comically misinterpreted as metaphor for political strategy. The film is the story of an idiot who finds himself accidentally, in the company of high society. Almost completely by mistake, Chauncey encounters himself surrounded by those closest to him, voracious for any morsels of plainspoken, horticultural musings that are absurdly interpreted as religious scripture. The idiot is adorned with the finest silks within the perfumed gardens of the elite; staring into the visage of his own Jester’s Privilege. 

First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again-Chauncey Gardiner