“Didn’t Start The Fire” Exhibition

Taymour Grahne Gallery

poster for “Didn’t Start The Fire” Exhibition

This event has ended.

Didn’t Start The Fire presents four artists’ varying approaches to recent and present day imperialism. Centering on the use of monolithic forms, the exhibition brings together works by Haig Aivazian, Nader Sadek, Kamau Amu Patton, and Yui Kugimiya.

Haig Aivazian‘s Why Should Fear Seize the Limbs Before the Warning Sounds? commemorates figurative fires, appropriating symbols from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and both Gulf Wars. Three wood sculptures recall the rigidity of statuary systematized by ancient and recent imperial regimes. While the sources from which they borrow are associated with monumentality, the three forms—representing a torch, a concrete barricade, and a trapdoor podium—are figureless and small in scale. Occupying separate plinths, they trace the theft of flames from the Greek mountains of Olympia to their release onto the oil fields of Iraq.

In Nigredo in Necromance, Nader Sadek’s music video for a song from his 2011 death metal album ‘In the Flesh,’ a narrative of crude oil, romance and despair plays out a series of generational archetypes. Set in the woods at nightfall, the piece finds its principal protagonist fingering his guitar as it transforms into a flesh-like, ink-leaking version of itself. As the music intensifies, so does the spill until eventually the black liquid covers the surrounding forest. The video’s props, all created by Sadek, are made of petroleum-based rubber and human hair, a material combination that foreshadows the silicon-skin-kiss in the piece’s final scene.

A soundscape of corporate language, Kamau Amu Patton’s Apple_Genius_Bar_2013 steadily builds itself into a tower of dissonance and static before disappearing and starting over. Recorded using in-store display computers while waiting for service at an Apple Store Genius Bar, the nearly seventeen-minute piece is a layered collage of customer service discussions and Mac device sounds played at varying speeds. Several vignettes, including one of an employee stating that ‘they’ are going to ‘run an inspection matrix,’ are repeated in conjunction with the Mac ‘empty trash’ sound and the “click-tap” of keyboards, suggesting invisible landfills of defective ghost devices.

In her six painting tableau, The the the, the the the, Yui Kugimiya animates plain forms and questions the stories that prop up the obelisks of 20th century abstraction. Hanging in a two-row grid, the small oils-on-canvas feature abstract shapes in fields of red, orange and pink. The alternating tones and leaning forms lend the discrete plastic spaces a processional quality. From left to right, the abstract shapes traverse consecutive pictorial planes. This trajectory is interrupted by the edges of the stretchers where the color fields fray to reveal brown and green hues while each raw underpainting critiques the ensemble’s fiction of continuity.

Buttressing one another in the exhibition, the works frame imperialist realities and contextualize their political landscapes. As the chorus from which the show’s title is borrowed states, today’s political fires and their subsequent American monoliths seem to have been “burning, since the world’s been turning.”

Media

Schedule

from July 14, 2014 to September 06, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-07-14 from 18:00 to 20:00

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