Nicholas Robinson Gallery is pleased to present Notes on Cultural Preservation, a exhibition curated by Jeffrey Uslip, which consists of three discrete solo exhibitions that offer diverse interpretations of Icon within the framework of contemporary visual culture. Through an epistemological lens, Ivaylo Gueorgiev, Mark Verabioff, and Robert Zungu translates how histories, narratives and legacies are unlocked and repositioned in the canon. These artists aim to signify reparations within the collective cultural imaginary and reveal how Icons retain relevance through transmutation.

Born in Bulgaria, Ivaylo Gueorgiev explores Iconoclasm through seven case studies, each a photorealistic facsimile of a masterpiece vandalized between the years 1914 and 1991. Gueorgiev's recent body of work explores how the destruction of masterpieces, known as ‘crimes against art,’ emblematize an attacker's desire for political, religious, and social change. Gueorgiev's point of departure grew from witnessing the end of Communism in Bulgaria and experiencing its aftermath, which included the destruction of numerous political and historical monuments. His paintings challenge the motivation behind of these crimes: rather than simply aiming to destroy national treasures, the assailants attempted to raise awareness for their causes.

Mark Verabioff's signature ‘dartboards’ are composed of two elements: a stream-of-consciousness phrase and Widdy darts. The text, installed on the wall in vinyl lettering, is punctuated by darts stabbed directly into the gallery walls. These linguistic dartboards employ language that sutures art historical vernacular with queer lexicon. Verabioff's dartboards, which originally began as guerrilla actions in gay bars, motel rooms, and urban graffiti, equalize the rhetoric of celebrity, politics, and contemporary art.

Robert Zungu presents three disparate artworks that each explore contemporary constructions of transience and reference the museum in ruins. These works present an in-depth examination of environmental conservation, the aesthetics of decay, and a historiographic analysis of the Icon: past, present, and future. In Mother Ape, Zungu translates a found plaster statue of a female gorilla into nickel-plated bronze. The gorilla, depicted cradling her newborn baby, alludes to a modern-day Pietà and proposes a contemporary, endangered interpretation of the Madonna and Child. Clay River God c. 1580 reproduces an illustration of Giovanni Bologna's ancient Clay River God from Rudolf Wittkower's reference book Sculpture: Processes and Principles. By reproducing a reproduction, Zungu twice distances the viewer from the artifact in an effort to reexamine a time when icons such as River Gods were idolized for being able to protect bodies of water and propagate new forms of life. Zungu's silver gelatin photograph, printed on fiber paper and hinged with archival mounting corners, furthers a historical difference of re-contextualization. Puritanical Half-Measures consists of a cast bronze flowerpot whose walls are pierced by a ram's horn, deer antlers, and marine barnacles. The work exhibits alchemical qualities where various registers collide - the vessel's form is conceptually and physically transformed in the process of its creation. The viewer is left to unravel the entropic crisis that caused this violent collision. Here, the re-contextualization of the Icon, and its aesthetic permutations, occur on violent, poetic, and entropic registers.

Notes on Cultural Preservation aims to reject an allegiance to history by presenting sociopolitical mores that suggest cultural differences between the Idol and the Icon.