Sam PulitzerDenials and Supplications plus SubdivisionSeptemberSep 6th - NovemberNov 1st, 2014Gaga Mexico City
Denials and supplications each refer to something that could be labeled as status conditions. Denial notes a state of being and supplication a presumption of becoming. It has been pluralized in the exhibition’s title to suit attachment to the multiple works on view.
This couplet of concern claims analogy in two scenic components of a construction central to the exhibition. One half of this construction dedicates space to a processional candelabra poised on a stand (a denial of darkness, a supplication to the visible). The second portion presents a makeshift table on which 6 identical, artistically fabricated greeting cards rest, presumably awaiting dispatch from a theatrically absent sender (a denial of distance, a supplication to discursive communion). In each of these scenes, the status conditions of denial and supplication are suggested thanks to an artistic exaggeration of absence—particularly the absence of utility. This can be described by the following: the absence produced by utility’s denial begets a supplicatory motor for ecstatic affirmation. To further clarify, this affirmation-from-without (which is also to say, the social grace by which this material plea becomes art) is an anointment of matter with system-optimized significance —that is to say, optimizing the contents of this exhibition with interest-appreciative wordings such as those of the exhibition’s title.
Subdivision describes a cognitive procedure for viewing the exhibition’s assembly of artistically decorated paper. This product is to be cohered as a spatially contiguous environment in which each individual document is a presentation of a subdivided plot of a larger scenic-diegetic claim. For example, a wooden structure housing a well (as well as a glove, a gourd and an item of domestic deçor) is depicted in one image. A weeping willow-fashioned portal is witnessed in another. Through consistent and complimentary image material, a media-space if you will, these separate images are identified as though they are a navigable space for eyes capable of walking. It is worth noting that this technique of visualization is derived from Hypercard stacks such as the 1989 educational adventure game, “The Manhole.”
Subdivision refers additionally to the cultural style of image on display, derived as it is from normative archives of colonial- to reconstruction-era American craft, a stylistic wellspring that has supplied the subdivided residential communities of North America with one possible decorative life- joy. Aspects of this history’s nascent mediality are also in-roaded throughout the work and even analogized via the overdetermined material residues of administrative culture—namely printer paper, correction fluid and xerographic toner.