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Searching the Sky for Rain @ SculptureCenter

2019

@ Sculpture Center, Long Island City, Queens, New York

This exhibition brings together works by artists who disregard the ways in which the art industry regulates, classifies, compartmentalizes, and essentializes difference into sanctioned categories. The artists in Searching the Sky for Rain defy the fracking of particularities into niche-marketed, T-shirt formulations of “identities” for institutional meaning and value production. These exploitative processes administer domination, forcing heterogeneity into operational packages for the stylization of a lukewarm cosmopolitanism.

The resulting rhetorical conflation of the maker and the work has led some producers to contend for the most bona fide representation in a highly competitive field where “authenticity” is rewarded as the primary source of value. While the proclaimed dominant position enjoys a hotline to abstract and structural thinking, others are often accorded only bare biography or story-time “feels” in the critical consideration and institutional presentation of their work. The question raised by Searching the Sky for Rain is: who has the right to abstraction? This question is neither a “theme” nor is necessarily the main concern of the included works, but it is at times one of their many components, or is indicative of a discursive ambivalence toward the worn-out framing devices that are formulated by the industry.

Against the backdrop of today’s hyper-expressionism, which in the absence of reflexivity poses the “self” as a coordinate with direct access to “truth,” the works in this exhibition advance the subject’s inherent non-sovereignty and unlocatability. As a character in Becket MWN’s audio work Paranoid House puts it, “anytime individuality is institutionally mandated it becomes a performance.”

Using various methodologies and strategies, the artists in the exhibition resist prescribing or following readily available image templates, relinquishing the pop-up politics of instant visibility. In Tony Cokes’ video Evil.27.Selma, we read how the pre-television civil rights movement prompted a “social collectivity heavily dependent on the imagination” that created abundance of “fantasy what-if” scenarios. The artists in Searching the Sky for Rain rally for such not-yet-articulated aesthetics. The exhibition is curated by Sohrab Mohebbi, Curator, with Kyle Dancewicz, Director of Exhibitions and Programs.

The exhibition includes work by: Carmen Argote, Tony Cokes, Rafael Domenech, Mandy El-Sayegh, Charles Gaines, ektor garcia, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, Tishan Hsu, Rindon Johnson, Becket MWN, Shahryar Nashat, Michael Queenland, Johanna Unzueta, Jala Wahid, Eric Wesley, and Riet Wijnen. Photos: Kyle Knodell

Why is labor so virtuous when we could have this other thing? (A true radical makes nothing.) What you choose to reinscribe is a form of previous pain brought upon another leave it, leave me be. Inscribe. I will not participate. Oops I’m participating. We’d be best to go a little too hard. (How do I decolonize something I cannot see?) Rose says to me as I am leaning half my body out the window to look at the dark looming cloud, We'll never know if it's going to rain until it rains, Rin. In Nicaragua they say: The world was once destroyed by a deluge. After its destruction, the gods created all things afresh.  ongoing  - rawhide, dirt, water, leaves, mold, bungee
Why is labor so virtuous when we could have this other thing? (A true radical makes nothing.) What you choose to reinscribe is a form of previous pain brought upon another leave it, leave me be. Inscribe. I will not participate. Oops I’m participating. We’d be best to go a little too hard. (How do I decolonize something I cannot see?) Rose says to me as I am leaning half my body out the window to look at the dark looming cloud, We'll never know if it's going to rain until it rains, Rin. In Nicaragua they say: The world was once destroyed by a deluge. After its destruction, the gods created all things afresh.  ongoing  - rawhide, dirt, water, leaves, mold, bungee
The stage is no place for the riot ongoing - rawhide, dirt, water
The stage is no place for the riot ongoing - rawhide, dirt, water
A louse and a flea were brewing beer in an eggshell. The louse fell in and burnt herself. This made the flea weep, which made the door creak, which made the broom sweep, which made the cart run, which made the ash-heap burn, which made the tree shake itself, which made the girl break her water-pitcher, which made the spring begin to flow. And in the spring's water everything was drowned. ongoing - rawhide, dirt, leaves, water
A louse and a flea were brewing beer in an eggshell. The louse fell in and burnt herself. This made the flea weep, which made the door creak, which made the broom sweep, which made the cart run, which made the ash-heap burn, which made the tree shake itself, which made the girl break her water-pitcher, which made the spring begin to flow. And in the spring's water everything was drowned. ongoing - rawhide, dirt, leaves, water
If we were frightened people we’d think this was a little bit scary: Watering flowers coming up from the sidewalk you said I could stuff some duck sausage in your pita pocket. Instead I press 3 fingers to your neck while you sound out the letter M. Then, O. Honey under your tongue, cane or water or cinnamon. Drag your head behind you. I cannot accept the bounds of what is known. Arise north, I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey. Is it a pleasure? Some passages elsewhere. Is night weather? You’ve captured my heart with one bead of your necklace. If you come to a place where I cannot see you I’ll move so I can see you. ongoing  - leather hide, sun, 35mm slide, slide projector, dirt, leaves, bushes, pergola, lily pond with lillies
If we were frightened people we’d think this was a little bit scary: Watering flowers coming up from the sidewalk you said I could stuff some duck sausage in your pita pocket. Instead I press 3 fingers to your neck while you sound out the letter M. Then, O. Honey under your tongue, cane or water or cinnamon. Drag your head behind you. I cannot accept the bounds of what is known. Arise north, I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey. Is it a pleasure? Some passages elsewhere. Is night weather? You’ve captured my heart with one bead of your necklace. If you come to a place where I cannot see you I’ll move so I can see you. ongoing  - leather hide, sun, 35mm slide, slide projector, dirt, leaves, bushes, pergola, lily pond with lillies