Carol Szymanski “Cockshut Dummy - A Ten-Year Composition”
Guided By Invoices
This event has ended.
On 8 November 2013, Guided by Invoices will inaugurate its new location with an exhibition by Carol Szymanski featuring 65 Lucite “tombstones” drawn from her ongoing email work titled cockshut dummy.
Szymanski has been producing this ongoing email art project for the last ten years, each “broadcast” containing a text with image, using the categories of Roget’s Thesaurus as its underlying structure.
From the first transmission, Existence, to the most recent one, Drunkenness (email 949), and eventually to the finish line, Temple (email 990), the series commemorates each category of the thesaurus with a “tombstone” and demonstrates the extension of Szymanski’s fundamental ideas using language and image. In its totality it amounts to a truly monumental work.
Syzmanski’s work has always been concerned with language but never before has she worked with language in such a concrete way. In the tradition of mail art, cockshut dummy takes the communicative medium of our time—email—and the technologies we use every day (laptop, cell phone) to take the work out of the studio and into our everyday life. At the same time, and on a more abstract level, it engages our systems of categorization, which are fundamental to knowledge and communication.
Evening: afterlife, twilight, sunset, elderliness, seniority, senility,
middle age, midlife, cockshut
Standard: average, common, commonplace, normal, run-of-the-mill,
unexceptional, unremarkable, dummy.
Carol Szymanski is an internationally exhibited artist who has been the recipient of the Rome Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, among others. This is her second solo exhibition with Guided by Invoices.
Media
Schedule
from November 08, 2013 to January 11, 2014
Opening Reception on 2013-11-08 from 18:00 to 20:00