Essay by Christopher Stackhouse

The title “SELF Check Out” invites a range of interpretation in meaning and action. The idiomatic phrase “check out” is a versatile one. It can mean to die; to look at someone; to investigate something; to verify or evaluate someone; to daydream; to settle a hotel bill; or, to pay for your items at a retail or grocery store. Grayson Cox and Nadja Frank support this multivalent provocation with work that analyzes leisure and consumption from distinct vantages. Cox has established a repertoire of strategies to mediate social exchange in micro and macro proportions, designing spaces and objects that bring attention to qualities of human interaction. Frank has committed to social interventions that celebrate human introversion and meditation in the face of an ever changing natural world. In fact, the natural world as a disinterested force, that subsumes and challenges our technological experiments, may be the subtext of these artists collaborative display.