Sreshta Rit Premnath “Knot Not Nought”

Kansas

poster for Sreshta Rit Premnath “Knot Not Nought”

This event has ended.

KANSAS presents a solo exhibition of Sreshta Rit Premnath. Opening January 25, the exhibition will run through January 1, 2014.

In 1974, under the auspices of Anka Ptszkowska’s gallery 25*, French conceptual artist Daniel Buren painted 8.7cm vertical stripes over the windows of an apartment in Warsaw that would later become Edward Krasinski’s studio. In the early 1990’s Krasinski applied his signature 20mm blue tape, 130cms above the floor, around the entire studio including the windows that Buren had painted. Both artists conceived of their gestures as being a zero mark that revealed the existing architecture in a space. They claimed that the line and the stripes were not things in themselves, but rather framing devices for opening onto a world. What happened when these gestures intersected?

In Knot Not Nought, Sreshta Rit Premnath revisits this historical moment. He uses it to shine a light on the difficulty of distinguishing between a gesture and an object. Redeploying the coincidence of these two previous works of art, he asks if two gestures pointing at each other can continue to function as framing devices, or are they conscripted into objecthood? Premnath brings to bear on this question a philosophical tradition that investigates the relationship between the things that exist and the empty space that permeates the universe. When we gesture toward an object, this school of thought reminds us, we are also gesturing at the nothingness that inheres in it. The being of objects ties the knot between what is and what is nought, but we have not the linguistic means to comprehend this space. It is here that Premnath turns to visual representation.

Performance # 25 and Gradient render the dimensions of a specific pair of windows in Krasinski’s studio. The first uses a gradient of black to white produced by bleaching linen. In the second, he uses a gradient from Chroma Key Blue to Chroma Key Green–standard backdrop colors used in the film and TV industry, which are normally replaced with scenery or effects in post-production. Premnath frequently uses these colors as “zero colors” that exist in order to be replaced, while still allowing an infinite gradient of possibility from one to the other.

J’ai perdu la fin (I have lost the end) is based on a performance by the same name in which Krasinski attempted to disentangle a long black cable. In Premnath’s sculpture of a black tube that snakes through a rectangular wooden frame, Krasinski’s cable is replaced by a “Zero Knot.” This is a mathematical form which literally does not have an end. In the same vein, I and X Knots works through the intriguing feature of the zero knot which may appear in an infinite number of entangled forms, all resolving to zero. Each frame of the series Zettel also animates this unending variation on zero. Titled and scaled after the first edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book of the same name, these prints were made by placing bleach-soaked twine on glossy, black C-Prints and lifting off the emulsion from their surfaces.

Finally, there is the small aluminum print in which the caption for a zig-zagging sculpture by Krasinski is replaced by a fragment from Zettel: “…But I cannot say this of the line VVVVV.” This, the only hand-drawn mark in Zettel, brings Wittgenstein and Krasinski into conversation. The line that cannot be spoken of also bears a relation to a painted-over line of blue tape that runs around the perimeter of the gallery space, a ghost of a line that is both there and not.

Sreshta Rit Premnath has had solo exhibitions at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Gallery SKE, Bangalore; Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago; Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin; Wave Hill, New York; Art Statements, Art|41|Basel; as well as numerous group exhibitions at venues including YBCA, San Francisco; Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris; 1A Space, Hong Kong; Thomas Erben Gallery and Friedman Benda Gallery, New York. He is the founder and co-editor of the publication Shifter and co-organizes the ongoing Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior. Premnath completed his BFA at The Cleveland Institute of Art, his MFA at Bard College, and has attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan and Smack Mellon. He has received grants from Art Matters and the Civetella Ranieri Foundation, and was awarded the Arthur Levitt Fellowship from Williams College. Based in Brooklyn, Premnath teaches at Moore College in Philadelphia.

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Schedule

from January 25, 2014 to March 08, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-01-25 from 18:00 to 20:00

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