Opening reception September 13, 2016 – 7PM-10PM
Exhibition dates: September 14 – November 6, 2016
Curated by Kelman Duran
Does a railroad never finished by colonial agents in Brazil signify a free-market halt? Does it point to a utopia filled with de-growth and unattainability as opposed to competition and expansion? A win for the forest and the Natives in it who didn’t succumb and who threatened to commit mass suicide if the logging continued to face them? Doesn’t the body in these circumstances subscribe to a policy of something prison like, or of escaping the speed of currency?
As soon as we step on a reservation we can see there is no difference between the traumatic and the catastrophic, because for populations that live in open air prison zones (Gaza, Indian Reservations) the catastrophe is the everyday. Like Oxana Timofeeva states “after all isn’t capitalism itself a catastrophe? Does it not kill workers? Isn’t, finally, the number of the capitalist beast inscribed into the bar-code of every commodity, as some crazy Christians never stop warning?” The res; the massacres, the suicide rate, the frozen bodies; life under the constant watch of the FBI in “third world” conditions with all the ghosts of their pasts walking through creeks and lands filled with uranium. Eva Chaverniasky in dealing with the body and its eternal- or not- relation to the market states “the framing of self-determination as self-ownership, of rights as property rights, informs the delineation of freedom as the freedom to dispose of one’s capacities on the open market.” Since reservations are economically and politically planned to stifle self-determination, what happens is something close an open air prison, “the inorganic body, fully opened to capital”here knowing its position in this prison either resists or becomes fully abstracted.
The works on view in the Project Room at LACE all reference this idea or theme of an open air prison, and some of the works, pragmatically provide insight into ways in which specific peoples have tried to combat this type of “imprisonment.”
Opening Night Performances:
Sarah Gail Armstrong (15 Minutes)
Exhibiting Artists:
LeRoy Janis (3 days)
Alice Wang (2 weeks)
Tasha Bjelic (2 weeks)
Monica Rodriguez (2 weeks)
Hailey Loman (1 Week)
Artist Screenings
Sunday November 6, 2016 – 2PM
Megan Daalder
Andrea Franco
Haaris Baig
Guy Rusha
Niq Brynolfson
Anna Katerina
Francisco Janes
