Pieter Schoolwerth “Your Vacuum Blows, which Sucks”
Miguel Abreu Gallery
This event has ended.
This show began one day when a very rare space opened up while I was cleaning my house. I was using a shitty old green vacuum and noticed it wasn’t picking anything up and, out of banal frustration, I instinctively blurted out “this vacuum sucks!” I then stopped for a moment to reconsider this statement: if it didn’t suck, it wouldn’t be a vacuum. In other words, performing the function of ‘sucking’ is precisely what creates its identity, yet if it doesn’t work properly, it still possesses and maintains this same identity – it sucks! There is (apparently) only one way it can be.
As one negotiates the presence of a vacuum, therefore, one is up against a dictatorial feedback loop in which, by intrinsically logical necessity, there is but one possible outcome, one way of being and feeling the presence of ‘it’. This somehow seems inordinately unsatisfactory. For the purposes of this exhibition, I wanted to understand why this is the case, and determine if, perhaps, there might be another way out of this state of affairs – a different way in which the vacuum could ‘work’ and be experienced.
That being said half an inch above, it seemed the best way to ‘figure’ this out was to set up a situation in which a figure enters the vacuum, is sucked-in, so to speak, and in being so also contractually accepts the terms necessitated by the feedback loop that her or his body also literally be sucked-out. By depicting a figure that is both in the vacuum – as a hole, a shadow, a warped reflection, or an abstraction – yet also literally and entirely removed from ‘it’, one might have an appropriate model by which to represent life in this previously unknown space, one in which ‘space’ (it’s self [sic]) has literally been ‘taken out’. In this process of producing simultaneous presence and absence, maybe it could be possible to inhabit a newly space-less ground zero of sorts, wherein the vacuum’s categorically enforced, sadistically singular rule of being is momentarily suspended, so that something else could happen… and everyone has a vacuum, which they routinely use to prepare and maintain the ground below.
Your Vacuum Sucks is an ever-expanding vacuum of paintings, drawings, and a single channel video produced in collaboration with Alexandra Lerman, which will be inaugurally plugged in at What Pipeline in Detroit (September 2014), then move on to New Delhi, India, at GallerySKE (October 2014), and land in New York at Miguel Abreu Gallery (March 2015). With each iteration the vacuum accumulates more and more material inside it’s (body) – an eminently space-less place – which, whether it ‘works’ or not, most certainly sucks… because if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a vacuum.
— Pieter Schoolwerth
Your Vacuum Sucks is an episodic video by Pieter Schoolwerth and Alexandra Lerman featuring (in order of appearance): Nate Young, John Olson, James Baljo, Madeline Hollander, Dean Bein, Anarexia Hurls, Mike Caiazzo, Dave Castillo, Contessa Stuto, and Blake Rayne. Music by Nate Young (Wolf Eyes), Soren Roi (RØSENKØPF, Nothing Changes NYC), and Jonathan Canady (Deathpile, Angel of Decay).
Schoolwerth has exhibited internationally with notable solo shows at Thread Waxing Space, Greene Naftali, American Fine Arts Co., Elizabeth Dee Gallery, and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York. His work has been included in group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, 303 Gallery, and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York. His fourth one-person exhibition at the gallery, After Troy, was followed by Shadows Past at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Brussels in 2013. In 2014, Schoolwerth had solo shows at What Pipeline, Detroit, Gallery SKE, New Delhi, India, and a two-person exhibition with Jonathan Lasker at Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid.
From 2003 to 2013, Schoolwerth ran Wierd Records and the Wierd Party at Home Sweet Home on the LES of NYC. Wierd released music by 42 bands working in the genres of minimal electronics, coldwave and noise, and produced over 500 live music, dj, and performance art events internationally (www.wierdrecords.com).
Media
Schedule
from March 22, 2015 to May 03, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-03-22 from 18:00 to 20:00