Something Else
All the artists kept talking about their process All the actives kept talking about this process

Mask or mirror or Plexi perimeter
Americana in Roma, excitable-familiar narrative
Write & exhibit & summer & (latently or devastatingly)
And slurry color—not like pools like waves Breaking against metal frames Small B&W prints indicating the technological hand That might hold them, precision of that Narrative: its nostalgia, gender, figurative…

… kaleidoscopic season of interiors of moments Projected upon it, cool stain, late summer All the wars across the water…

…plexi pool that we fall into, once fabricated Woman with a camera shifting across the field, refracting…

…La Marinière not Italian but whatever Surface affects obscuring the story
A badly printed image haunts me, and it is the very reason for my being here at a table that otherwise gradually empties the more that summer gets closer.
The printer stopped working midway – leaving me with a halved image, an automatic mechanical response to a prior framing through cutting, juxtaposing and layering images. Onto what looks like a palimpsest of images – the reproduction of a painting, a line, corners of frames, all in a pinkish sepia tone that most probably the printer decided was the appropriate tint to give to this work – rest two close-ups of hands displaying objects. They both hold what appears to be a wire circle. One is also pinched by a medical tool, similarly thin, as if it were drawn in air. The hand and the circle might be reoccurring in the back: rephotographed, enlarged, suggesting that the current state of this work is temporary. A gesture, temporarily framed. Gestures. I find myself trying to hold onto glimpses that works offer to me for a possible conversation to happen, for if a common language is to be found, it is also true that there is a moment before you meet the artist, before you come to terms with a practice, when you are simply haunted by the presence of a work. It is a sort of seduction that ushers in the desire to see more. (A seduction that, one must confess, rests on recognizing something familiar, for the rule that we are attracted from what we know. Love is a sort of pre-cognition, ultimately)…

…collecting, presenting and then archiving. To continue.
make a picture rather than take one…

…not to take yourself so seriously all the time. have the pleasure of seeing someone you don’t know naked, visually, emotionally, etc, and not have it be weirdly exploitative. see yourself in a picture or a mirror and not feel self-conscious. see the person in a picture, in the mirror is really you, and not just some alienating representation of you…

…turn your car towards the horizon on crumbling asphalt and keep driving into the smear of sunsetting colors till you reach the end of night without ever leaving your home…

…make it more about the feeling of that tender reveal and the naked freedom of not being so cynically defensive and cowardly, of not being limited by how damaged you are. just own that being ‘damaged’ is so normal for everybody that damaged probably isn’t even the right word anymore…

…take out that weird middle at the origin of a “medium.” admit that the maker of the picture and the picture and the things and people in the picture and the thing the picture is printed on are not really separate, but coalesce into a single moment of perception

Guest curator Alex Ross
with contributions from Andrew Berardini, Cecilia Canziani, Quinn Latimer