Apparatus
Show statement by curator AV Ryan
This exhibition brings together recent sculptures by Grayson Cox and early works on mylar by Joan Waltemath, on view in the US for the first time.
Grayson Cox’s Market Graph II (2020) fuses the metrics of our current crises — covid cases, unemployment figures and market profiteering — into a large-scale relational sculpture. Greed and grief, isolation and economic ruin reduced to line and number populate our newsfeeds. Cox projects the graph as a fever-red interface for the body. Eleven feet long and16 inches wide, Market Graph rises to over 5 and a half feet and falls to table-height, just right to lean your elbow on. His newest works include floor paintings of the blue and white Amazon Prime bubble wrap mailers and a flurry of iced coffee cups — beguiling yet pointed indices of upwardly mobile convenience, excess and waste.
Joan Waltemath’s White Skins (2003) are spiritual indexical portals. Plotted on softly translucent mylar and burnished in colored pencil, the largest units in these arrays of squares, bands and rectangles recede. What is smallest is nearest; at times they seem to float towards us. Taking her inspiration from reverse perspective — used by icon painters to open a window to the divine — Waltemath’s grid matrix has structured her work for the past twenty-five years. These drawings are some of Waltemath’s earliest attempts, using that matrix, to explore her experiences with Lakota spiritual ceremonies. While the initial impression is one of architectural drawings, slowly they offer breathing room. The drawings are accompanied by Waltemath’s nighttime recordings of the prairie in her native Nebraska.
This exhibition takes its cue from Giorgio Agamben’s essay, What is an Apparatus? Agamben urges us to intervene in the power structures and forms of knowledge that delimit our possibilities — especially now as we are being shaped by new forms of surveillance and control. To intervene is to not only to uncover a degree of freedom in ourselves but also, he argues, the pre-condition for rebuilding community. This exhibition stages its own apparatus to reflect on these matters. With performances by Simone Kearney & Joan Waltemath, Hollis Witherspoon, AV Ryan & Joan Waltemath and other guests.
