“Itself Not So” Exhibition
Lisa Cooley Fine Art
This event has ended.
Lisa Cooley presents Itself Not So, curated by Rachel Valinsky. Titled after a poem from Susan Howe’s Frolic Architecture, the exhibition takes aphasia, a cognitive disorder causing an inability to understand or produce speech, as a cypher with metaphoric and metonymic implications. The show assembles a variety of practices and strategies that, when taken together, form a polyphonic response to the fundamental rupture between thought and expression that aphasia engenders.
The works in the exhibition scatter words across a visual, sonic, and ideational field. Hovering on the edge of articulacy, they engage with the structure of language steeped in various automatisms, blind spots, absurdisms, pathologies, interferences, dismemberments, and viral dislocations. They explore the silences wrought by incomprehension and impenetrability, where communication breaks down, or is mired in doubt, hesitance, stuttering. Likewise, the participating artists linger in the ellipses of association, opening up different possible correspondences between language, representation, and meaning by complicating the ways in which ideas, sounds, and images are produced, transmitted, and understood.
Itself Not So ushers in the moment of enunciation where the voice is heard but the word does not pronounce itself. Or, alternatively, the word is transmitted, but its meaning not understood. The project aims not to culminate in aphasia universalis—the total loss of power to use or apprehend speech, total silence—but rather to interrogate partial losses and silences, forgettings and unlearnings, piecemeal understanding, inchoate signification, and possibilities of communicating, however haphazardly.
Performances by Fia Backström, Ben Vida, and Research Service (Avi Alpert, Mashinka Firunts, and Danny Snelson) will take place during the course of the exhibition, on the 21st and 28th of August.
Media
Schedule
from August 07, 2014 to August 29, 2014
8/21, 8/28 Performance by Fia Backström, Ben Vida, and Research Service. See http://lisa-cooley.com/events for detail.
Opening Reception on 2014-08-07 from 18:00 to 20:00