January 25 - March 29, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 24, 6-8pm

MAIN SPACE: Nina in Position

Artists: Kelly Barrie, Justin Beal, Huma Bhaba, Anya Gallaccio, Wade Guyton, Barkley Hendricks, Roni Horn, Igloolik Isuma Productions, Mary Kelly, Charles Long, Michelle Lopez, Andrew Lord, Robert Mapplethorpe, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Jack Pierson, Michael Queenland, Marco Rios, Amanda Ross-Ho, Julia Scher, Haim Steinbach, Lisa Tan, Josh Tonsfeldt


Curated by Jeffrey Uslip

Nina In Position presents diverse artistic strategies that complicate the legibility of lack and difference in America. The selected artworks employ Walter Benjamin’s assertion, “To live is to leave traces,” as a platform from which to view and critique the body and its environs. Occupying Artists Space’s main gallery with a series of sculptural and post-sculptural gestures, Nina In Position reveals emancipated forms that, through their inherent deviance, function as “resistance to regimes of the normal.” Nina In Position is an attempt to articulate a new trajectory of sculptural encounters that rebel against the condition described by Benjamin as “Left Melancholia.” The exhibition’s curatorial focus aims to unlock the ways in which artistic exercises, histories, and narratives are re-signified within contemporary visual culture.

Nina In Position strives to challenge strict parameters of objecthood, exhibiting works that evade limitations and stealthily avoid genre. The work in the exhibition is hybrid, activated, and hyper-aware of its immediate environment. The gallery functions as a safe-house harboring artworks that, through their radicality and hybridity, challenge hierarchy and authority. The artworks elaborate sculpture’s mercurial qualities by examining materiality, transience, and the processes of making. They dodge overarching paradigms of social change, and instead gesture towards unknown forms, new constructions, and alternative modes of representation. Employing a Socratic strategy, Nina In Position’s curatorial matrix places intergenerational artworks in dialogue in order to identify how social, cultural, and geopolitical change occurs on a local level, as well as to articulate how methodologies, practices, and tolerance shape-shift over decades..

CAMPARI PROJECT SPACE:

Shana Lutker: Combined Faulty Acts

Los Angeles-based artist Shana Lutker investigates the psychological associations between objects through sculptural and photographic means. In Lutker’s diverse body of work, objecthood is scrutinized in relation to space  and subjectivity. Shana Lutker’s debut New York solo exhibition, Combined Faulty Acts, consists of four discrete  bodies of work, each challenging symbolic representations of a Republic and interrogating the consequences of a politicized, reactionary Polis in a democratic society. Deeply influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theories of dream analysis, specifically in his seminal texts The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Combined Faulty Acts furthers Lutker’s examination of the advancement and devolution of civilizations within the realm of visual culture.

Combined Faulty Acts responds to the consequences, on both micro and macrocosmic levels, of repetitive actions with potentially disastrous repercussions.  Freud’s examination of an individual’s transition from forgetting to remembering, through the process of disabling “screen memories,” is mirrored in the exhibition.  Lutker’s four artistic devices are an attempt to enable the viewer’s consciousness to (re)emerge and take full accountability of the faulty actions and disturbances of everyday life.  In this exhibition, we may also attempt to (re)cognize America’s compromised position in the world as a result of procedural errors and unethical governance. Combined Faulty Acts is an allegorical case study that poses significant questions to what Freud describes in The Future of an Illusion (1927), as “[a] culture which leaves unsatisfied and drives to rebelliousness so large a number of its members neither has a prospect of continued existence nor deserves it.”