POTENTIAL BODIES

Sometimes, a work possesses a peculiar, autonomous quality.  It doesn’t have a traditional framing device to indicate exactly where it resides.  What it is made of is unidentifiable, if only momentarily.  What it is trying to tell you is not completely clear or translatable.  It lives in incompletion, which only prompts more questions.  We look, and it shifts in our vision, oscillating between categories, names, and perspectives.  Boundaries are pushed to make space; they can be made porous and flexible.

These works—and the fourteen artists that made them—find themselves at an intersection between aesthetic and anti-aesthetic practices.  They are highly formal yet still deal with content on a deep level whether the subject is gender, relationships, societal norms of beauty, ecological anxieties, or queerness.  Our first encounter with content is through their materiality.

The artists appropriate materials for new and often ridiculous purposes, perverting their initial function.  Even if the material is recognizable, there is the space within a split second where we have the ability to see it as something else, unnamable.  In this way, the objects invite imagination, fishtailing on the edge between transformation and readymade.

Animated by some unseeable force, these works won’t allow for passive consumption.  They act upon you just as your gaze acts upon them, this intimate action ping-ponging back and forth between work and receiver.

By asking questions of us, these potential bodies prompt other worlds into existence.  They reflect on the past, address the present, and imagine a future.

August 1 – 15, 2014

The Space @ 10455 Jefferson Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232

Artists:

Kohl King, Cedar Miller, Kristen Bradford, Rodd Zinberg, Andrea Brown, Derek Corns, Allison Peck, Shiva Aliabadi, Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Sofia Londono, Liz Nurenberg, Kristy Baltezore, Heidi Kidon, Jane Gillespie Pryor

Curated by Allison Peck

Curatorial Assistant: Kristy Baltezore