NYAB Event - John Roebas & Eric Veit “A Passionate History of Linguistic Accomplishments”

John Roebas & Eric Veit “A Passionate History of Linguistic Accomplishments”

Jack Hanley

This event has ended.

What can sometimes pass, at the conjunction of distinct materials - say, Blesbok horn, leather, brass, beeswax, nigella, glass, and hay; or an IBM #95925 clock, urethane resin, rubber, imitation Calvin Klein Eternity cologne, akoya pearl oysters, vinyl, frosted glass, erased photographs, and pigment - is an encounter which suggests a cultural understanding resonates between them. So thoroughly can these experiences lodge themselves in the mind that they appear to, for a moment, transmute the senses into an innate poesy or art, that, as if by virtue of sight alone, these queer objects had been composed. We haven’t much respect for this slight-of-hand anymore, beleaguering our experiences with concrete typologies and a deeply impoverished position by which to know them - and not the least related, the intractable facts of sociality and economics, which can make life feel wholly contingent to use. Laugh, fine, a better way to be; it’s a question of reading, being a reader, and being read. We would lose much were it not for this sometimes pathetic subjectivity, that to perceive and interpret without claim, being a reader maintains and liberates by a certain mystery of cognition.

John Roebas (b. 1985; lives in New York). Recent exhibitions include Levy Delval (solo exhibition), Brussels, Belgium & Levy Delval (solo exhibition), Los Angeles, California, Bryce Wolkowitz, New York, New York, Galleri Jacob Bjørn, Aarhus, Denmark, Galerie Jeanrochdard, Paris, France and Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine. Forthcoming exhibitions include Centre D’Action Culturelle, Niort, France (2015) and Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana courtesy Neochrome Gallery, Turin, Italy (2015).

Eric Veit (b. 1986) lives and works in New York. His work has been shown recently at Tomorrow, New York, SpazioA, Italy, Interstate Projects, New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Important Projects, Oakland, Queer Thoughts, Chicago, and Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. He is a founder and director of Bodega, a gallery and publisher based in New York.