The Heart is the Frame

Works by Leidy Churchman, Harry Dodge, William E. Jones, Sharon Lockhart, Emily Roysdon, Anna Sew Hoy, and Tris Vonna-Michell

The Heart is the Frame is a group exhibition that questions the practice of everyday living by breaking down the cinematic guise of commonplace existence into a series of still images. It aims to surface the scripts that direct one’s daily course, and address the ways in which one’s actions are bound to a designated articulation of time – at a given pace / in the present / moving forward – and its ensuing choreographies of movement.

The exhibition explores the routinized acts that constitute the dailyness of life – from workplace tasks to the maintenance of public life – to bare the impact of habitual existence and to ask what happens when these unromantic acts amass or shift out of sync. Among the works, impending variations take the form of strange encounters, temporal contractions, and deviations off-path, all placed alongside the mills of necessity that ask one to consume and create at a prescribed rate. By examining notions of reiteration and routine – acts that are irreplaceable but endlessly repeatable – and their ruptures, The Heart is the Frame aims to unveil how these recurring processes shape our conception of time and our relationship to the body and its uses.

Curated by LACE Assistant Director Shoghig Halajian.

Download the curatorial essay and checklist here.

Image (top of page): Emily Roysdon, Untitled (David Wojnarowicz project), 11×14 inch silver gelatin print, 2001-2007.
Image (above): Installation view (detail), courtesy of Betsy Winchell.

SUPPORT
The Heart is the Frame is made possible with the support of Silberkuppe, Berlin; Higher Pictures, New York; David Kordansky, Los Angeles; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Metro Pictures, New York; Overduin & Co., Los Angeles; and all the participating artists.