Et Al Projects

Eventually, a huge pile of good news will be unfurled. Here are the next few exhibitions. First, a second solo show of the combined efforts of Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour, The Misbehaving Object, at City Limits gallery in SF, March 29th. Then Shrödinger’s Cats, with new works by Andrew Chapman, Christopher Füllemann, Aaron Finnis, Dana Hemenway, and Ginger and Primitivo Wolfe-Suarez. , part 1 of a 2(+…) part exhibition, at Important Projects April 6th. (next at The Popular Workshop in June)

Last of the three shows, a 1 person, 2 person, and finally this three person show with 1 video, 2 sculptures, 3 collages. 

“(Paraphrasing Jason Benson)

A photo of the too too packed opening for VV. And one of Jason Benson’s pieces in The Bensons, opening tomorrow (January 18th). We are a featured weekend event in the Chronicle, with a picture of Mark Benson’s work in both the digital and physical newspaper today. 

More archive worthy shots of the series of the shows to replace this post once the three have passed… this idea, multiple short shows, has been very fun to do and I think a success for the artists.

Our next project, Schrödinger’s Cats, is also a multi-part project, though instead of several unrelated shows clustered together, it will be two itterations of the same show at different venues, one in April and one in June. Details to follow shortly.

A pair of snap shots from the Et al. booth at NADA Miami.

In Stasis

September 7 – 30, 2012 

MacArthur B Arthur, Oakland, CA

With work by Johanna Billing, Liam Everett, Roza Janiszewska, Bob Linder, Anna Sagström, and Joseph Thomas.

In Stasis is an exhibition that is at a stand off with itself. It is neither about a specific idea nor is it simply a collection of objects, though objects and ideas certainly play a part. The exhibition sits in an intermediary space, much like the people in Johanna Billing’s Project for a Revolution. In it, a young group of people sits waiting for the next thing to happen; there is a potential forestalled, whether this is out of incapacity or apathy is unclear. Likewise the works in the show will take up room in the gallery – waiting for the next step, for something to happen.

In biology a stasis is a period of no evolutionary change, in which a species has reached a state of punctuated equilibrium. Is the exhibition period a length of time in which a group of objects and images are frozen in such a state – the auratic effect of the nomination art- work taking as its price change – or is presentation the beginning of an alternative state? Whether an artwork equates ambition fulfilled, the seed of potential agency or a barring of the future is difficult to ascertain.

Meanwhile, locked in the gallery, the artworks relax, spending most of their days in an unpeopled room amongst each other without a reading from a viewer or the familiar hand of their fabrication, the memory of which is fading. 

Images of Liam Everett’s work appears courtesy of Altman Siegel.

Parergon 

August 4 - 17, 2012

As part of House Show, 1506 Peralta Street, Oakland, CA

With work by Facundo Argañaraz, Kate Bonner, Aaron Finnis, and Hillary Wiedemann.

Parergon is an exhibition of works incorporating elements on the edge of the void between artwork and the world – the frame, the wall text, the pedestal, the walls, the floors, et al. The works intimately integrate these elements into their subject and substance.

The site is the basement of a home in West Oakland, a place that is specific both socio-politically and architecturally. Rather than explicitly addressing these issues, Parergon instead looks at site-specificity as a function of the framework of the individual artwork. For this exhibition, we borrow the phrase “parergon” from Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting, in which art is “ergon” and “parergon” is that which is nearly outside the work, the edge, the supplement. Derrida contends that the distinction between the inside (ergon) and the outside (parergon) can never be fully attained; the parergon is something that is neither outside nor inside and works both within and without the ergon “without being a part of it and yet without being absolutely extrinsic to it.”

Challenged by and reactive to a highly charged context, art can via this type of engagement bleed outward from its frame, into the world.

The aura of art is spun via interplay between its primary matter (what is immediately recognized as ‘art’) and the ideas or matters suggested by its surface – the work is a lemma, a stepping-stone towards a broader result, a contention for premises below it and a premise for a contention above it. This interplay allows the reverse: obvious or true seeming extensions can serve to substantiate the primary work. A frame, floor, text et al. can suggest other possible forms, while siting and legitimizing the work of art; or potentially it can destabilize, alienate, and/or outweigh.

EXPO’

April 27 - 28, 2012

Liminal Space, Oakland, CA

With work by Hannah Ireland, Benjamin Vilmain, James Cordas & Hunter Longe, Joseph Rosenzweig. 

An Expo is a meeting of different parties in a host space, a neutral territory – which is arguably never completely neutral - in which each presents some manner of wares. In this exhibition the un-neutral site is Liminal Space. The different parties are artists who are presenting a range of thematically and materially disparate new works.

Liminal Space is a large venue with definite characteristics that are both architectural and pertaining to patterns of usage. It is unavoidably specific in an explicit sense; exaggerating the manner in which each site of presentation is inherently unique (however white and cube-like). In Expo’, the artists’ four installations will differently situate themselves in relation to their context. Some of the works find themselves configured to fit the space, others comment on aspects of Liminal Space’s uses (as a temporary library, music venue et al.) and peculiarities (the odd shallow gap in the floor, the huge resonant black room.).

Additional information will be provided later

April 6 – 29, 2012

MacArthur B Arthur, Oakland, CA

A solo exhibition of work by Anthony Discenza. 

In popular remodel shows such as “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” the operation of a domestic interior is suspended, and re-envisioned as a production site for the creation of a new, “better” home.  The home is denied its identity, its home-ness, for the duration of an unoccupied remodeling. The engine of such shows is the spectacle of a certain “behind-the-scenes” voyeurism, where aggressive demolition is followed by Sturm und Drang consultations regarding fabric colors and bathroom finishes.  At the end, a satisfyingly cathartic release is provided for all via the big reveal: the bus is moved, the doors are opened and the home-turned-production site shifts radically, via the implied return of use value, back into a home, one more in keeping with the dictates of conventional tastes and the market.

It can be said that contemporary artistic praxes, in their current deployment, suffer from a similar logic.  The metaphor is a tenuous one, but there is some use in it.  The artist’s studio is a place where signs and matter are subjected to a process of being broken down, re-imagined and re-assembled, in order that they may be assigned a new status/identity, that of the artwork.  Then, magically, these materials, having undergone their makeover at the hands of the artist, are delivered to a venue and set up for display, in the big reveal of “The Exhibition.” 

But, as Godard declared, ‘Every edit is a lie.’ What is problematic here is the cut at the end of the show.  In EMHE, a large bus reveals the house to the family/us after the remodel is completed, and they/we scream, cry and emote as we proceed to tour the result of the miraculous transformation from old home to new house.  But there is always a mysterious break, a point of discontinuity, between the final stages of labor and production and the presentation of the finished result.  The remade house is now re-presented as a fait accompli, from which all traces of the intense upheaval we have just witnessed have been purged.  Similarly, under the paradigm of exhibition practice, we are typically denied the intense uncertainty of the artist as to the status, quality, and meaning of his/her own product.  In this way, the exhibition is a false edit in the flow of actual artistic practice, placing the artist and the work into sharply delineated narratives of production (labor) and presentation (marketing) that deny the often incomplete nature of artistic investigation.

In Additional information will be provided later, Anthony Discenza is presenting work that represents a number of different inquiries within his practice.  These works, which may or may not be “finished,” make no attempt to reconcile how they may fit together into a more cohesive narrative or artistic “brand.”  We (the curators and Discenza) would like to posit that the remodel of stuff into art is a murkier business than the standard division between [studio production] and [exhibition display] acknowledges.  Our intention is to complicate this model by providing multiple points of access for conversation, critique, expansion, and general uncertainty. We intend to leave open the question of what constitutes a finished work, both in words (via artist/curatorial statements) and in space, by situating both the context and presentation of the work as things most unsettled, forestalling completion of the auratic makeover into art.