group show in collaboration with Reilly Davidson

The fur has teeth. When strung together, these words demonstrate linguistic strangeness. Interlacing soft and hard, severe and benign, the independent clause hovers beyond resolution. If language is taken as malleable, such could also be the case with objects, ideas, and forms. It is apparently the plight of the 21st century to be living after the end of history and within a domain of informational overdrive. Accordingly, collecting and recasting preexisting elements becomes less an act of citation than a method of critical arrangement. Nicolas Bourriaud effectively underscores this quest in Postproduction, writing “the end of the modernist telos (the notions of progress and the avant-garde) opens a new space for thought: now what is at stake is to positivize the remake, to articulate uses, to place forms in relation to each other, rather than to embark on the heroic quest for the forbidden and the sublime that characterized modernism.” He points directly to a “deejaying of visual forms” as the new frontier for cultural producers in the twenty-first century. The artists here actively exploit the vault, cataloging and revealing hidden structures that might otherwise go unchecked.

Through painterly iteration, Helen Shu largely obscures the autobiographical roots of her compositions. Referents become sublimated through the abstract process, her distillation methods pushing the resulting work into territories that resist outright derivation. Traceable fragments do surface on occasion, as personal scraps and relics intermittently slip into the paintings. These shapes and images are pulled from a growing library, fodder for constant revival and recombination that Shu approaches with clear dexterity.

Occupying a more pictorial terrain, Tanja Widmann largely repurposes existing cultural ephemera, redirecting it into new networks of images, space, and time. She manipulates portraits from Richard Prince’s already appropriative “Girlfriends” series, subjecting them to further reassignment. These women are once again taken out of context, funnelled into new discursive ecosystems. Widmann’s interventions, however, are not an attack on the primacy of images, but rather function as negotiations within its economies of circulation and systems of meaning.

Rafał Skoczek’s readymade inclinations become the apparatus driving structural inquiry. Across his practice, Skoczek reveals the contours of the everyday through preserving then reorienting disused items as art-objects. He translates structures from the outside to the inside, reconstituting them within the gallery space as a means to evince new territorial possibilities. Plucked from the Wiedikon neighborhood in Zurich, these panels bear the sun-printed shadows of the fence they served to protect. On a previous visit to Brussels, Skoczek stayed in a squat with a troupe of nomadic breakdancers, amongst others. One morning he woke to find a sad clown standing in the center of the room. It became readymade fodder, the artist trailing him through the city to document his meandering rituals and minor performances as they played out.

In a different corner, Charlemagne Palestine’s world is populated with dadaist maneuvers, non-hierarchical object play, ecstatic video pieces, and experimental sonic landscapes. Central to this particular exhibition is his “plushie” menagerie; he retrieves and inherits legions of stuffed animals, seeing them not as mere playthings, but as carriers of spiritual energy. These beings float, cling, lay, and perform, their arrangements conducted in harmony with the multifarious works on view.

Disposability and circulation are central to Yun Heo’s Aromaboy. Her pileup of objects demonstrates the dissemination or potential obsolescence of certain consumer goods and cast-off materials. The toilet-as-system becomes an antisocial site of flux, where waste, repetition, maintenance, and movement cooperate. Here, a mix of found and fabricated components are clustered, reiterated, and situationalized in reference to these operations. This configuration rests in a somewhat oppositional territory, as the artist leverages assemblage toward the abject and excessive—the stuff that cannot truly be contained.

In the waning stages of his essay, Bourriaud insists “to rewrite modernity is the historical task of this early twenty-first century: not to start at zero or find oneself encumbered by the storehouse of history, but to inventory and select, to use and download.” He suggests that those practicing within this archive-saturated present are moving beyond sheer appropriation, actively recoding existent semiotic assemblages and flows. This exhibition is thus a testing ground for interference, with artists that take, store, block, reshape, and redefine the archive. Clashes between sleek, dirty, perverse, and cute notions and aesthetics facilitate the evergreen potential of inventories that are ripe for reshuffling.

– Reilly Davidson