Veronica

Morgan Ritter
The Cat House Settlement
September 22 - October 27, 2018

Veronica, Offsite 
Francesca and Nicholas’ garage

The Cat House Settlement by Morgan Ritter is a display of carpeted cat houses in a Seattle garage. Ritter has been developing this work for about three years.

The cat houses are constructed from items one would typically find in a garage such as neglected furniture, ladders, pallets, and some obsolete domestic structures. The Cat House Settlement is a project of dissociation and fantasy, responding to her experiences of crises and disappointment in the human species. 

The garage is favored over the gallery for its associations of intimate workshop space, safe area for scrappy prototyping and invention, and site for garage sales. All works were fabricated in her garage studio, hence the incorporation of some of her artwork as stand-ins for cats. 

Supplementing this work is a list-poem that attempts to catalogue all the possible functions of art (a majority of which are critical, if not negative). The artist’s long-time fixation on cat houses is born from...
• an inclination to reject the art market proper.
• striving to genuinely make work for non-humans, with an interest in its inherent contradictions. Paradoxical is the human understanding of non-human desires, always limited by the human vocabulary of domestic material, structures, comfort… i.e. in the omnipresent use of beige carpet.
• a curiosity about structures outside of our own comprehension.
• an affinity for cats and interspecies interactions.

*For the duration of The Cat House Settlement, Veronica’s gallery space will house items previously found in the garage. This is not an exhibition.

*Both the “Art as…” list poem and the cat houses do not end when the exhibition comes to a close. Ritter will continue working on both projects for the remaining duration of her life.

—Morgan Ritter

Art as a dream to be protected
Art as a puff of air jetting directly into my eye
Art as happy in a process
Art as the utopic born from the dystopic
Art as more I Love New York merchandise
Art as a compromised result of accommodating an institution’s requirements
Art as no vacancy, or vacancy
Art as all you can eat
Art as a perpetuation of consumerism, no matter how radical its motivations or aesthetic
Art as a crucible of negotiating perversions
Art as t-shirts, easily disseminated, to be embodied
Art as the concept of non-locality, somewhere inside my head
Art as other people’s parties
Art as leashed, the dog carries its own leash sometimes
Art as an obedient, endangered beast
Art as bruised, a result of force directed into material or self
Art as a penny-filled swamp, I’ll hide in that for a while
Art as community development
Art as a mastery over weapons. Who has the privilege to read the instructions
Art as log of relations
Art as an agitator, blender, thunder-stick mixer, kitchen appliance soon neglected, boxed up, waiting for someone’s wedding registry or garage
Art as variegated air
Art as finger play
Art as look at my body
Art as surpassing explanation, successful only in its ability to evade reductive language
Art as problem solving
Art as a solution, potion, fluidity
Art as the beyond, or the standardized
Art as a detox agent
Art as building a family, no less neurotic, unconditionally there
Art as a conditional love
Art as reconfiguration of preexisting elements
Art as a speculation of wistful infatuation, a love one-sided
Art as in let’s Skype or go on dates
Art as the unbeknownst
Art as déjà vu, senti vu, presque vu, deja vecu, deja senti, deja visite
Art as an illustrated anomaly, more graphic design than art
Art as manufactured experiences
Art as grappling with regulation
Art as look into this light
Art as let’s meet at the jungle gym, posse
Art as tapped
Art as a television, leveled
Art as trail mix, scattered
Art as who witnesses him invading her personal space, he asks to kiss her in a studio visit, makes her uncomfortable to the point where she verbalizes it, and then in a threatening tone, he asserts that he is comfortable
Art as an excuse to repeatedly show up uninvited
Art as leave me alone
Art as managing difficult emotions by directing all life force energy into exhaustive laborious tasks actually consequential to one’s health
Art as the scream, essentially uncontainable but somehow within the boundaries of a work
Art as let’s be careful or else people could die
Art as stress and release
Art as a fussy playmate without a diaper
Art as not limited to its apparent parameters
Art as a charged object, vibrating outside of fixed narratives, defying projections
Art as imprisoned by prevalent methods of profiling, with a human desperation for definition, despite inherent complexity
Art as self-inflicted torture without end, seldom satisfying
Art as I grew up in toxic chambers, and all I got was this lousy __________
Art as I got f’d up and this happened
Art as standing next to a demon-eating grape hor’d’eurve
Art as an exquisite corpse of an appetizer served with or without napkin
Art as she wore a tie for herself
Art as survivalist reality tv shows
Art as an anchor point from which I can move this way or that, with a whole-hearted and innocent curiosity of the unknown
Art as anti-metaphor. Doing itself despite its accompanying language
Art as ready to go, packed in styrofoam and paper. EXTRA SPICY
Art as take out, gotta have it. Gotta have it. Gotta have it
Art as you can’t catch me, my trajectory will make you dizzy, I am a butterfly
Art as a re-release
Art as bug in a jar
Art as an internationally distributed newsletter
Art as positionable on a pinnacle, until it appears to vanish at a certain distance
Art as a barely conceivable document
Art as outrage, erected
Art as a pissing contest
Art as the untraceable path of a tissue falling in the breeze
Art as extremities
Art as how freaks function
Art as a practice of shrine-making with fluorescent light
Art as a questionable translation
Art as gripping the table, tension in the body soon releases
Art as god’s toy ball, once bouncy, now confined to a vitrine, except in the imagination
Art as tool dip me, reference me, use me
Art as they will try to take it all from you
Art as athletics
Art as here is what actually happened, in plain view
Art as the textures of interpersonal dynamics
Art as a life, contrived
Art as a tool belt tolerance
Art as window sports, Xfinity as my imaginary cat, reprogramming the brain
Art as to be in climate-controlled environments. Or controlled environments. The spa is a controlled environment, as is the institution
Art as what is concealed and what is revealed? What is transformed
Art as punishment. Demands. Sit on that bench and look at me
Art as secondary to the release of selfies
Art as to be a young woman at the airport. I am pushed up against a wall. Consumed at a distance, protected by air. Won’t catch me. Women’s bathroom. Body guard
Art as the ding dong vision facing a fire extinguisher
Art as my man cave. A garage chalked full of dull equipment, blanketed with cobwebs, shreds of decrepit carpet scraps all over my sweater. In my hair. In the distance, I hear a monkey but it is a crow. Something moves when you enter the garage. People may or may not see the value in your work. Pedestrians inquire if this is a garage sale. Not exactly a sale, this is my life. Edit: Now for sale because I am in debt more than $60,000 and I was just laid off from my job
Art as click bait
Art as to be riddled with workaholic tendencies. Capitalism and Productivity. Why do we work so hard
Art as unverifiable but pure
Art as grating surfaces. Grating the thought of how to say it, so you try to make it
Art as decked the F out
Art as a sketch of Art that could never be made
Art as an inconvenient poem
Art as a rank pile of compost that the neighbors can smell from their front door or from their car windows
Art as merely a backdrop for a photo op
Art as a substantiation of inner life
Art as the privilege of selection; material, symbolic, energetic, or otherwise
Art as a more valuable surface of wall
Art as direct communication with spiritual forces
Art as patiently on pallets
Art as dude has a complex
Art as in a nutshell
Art as a promotional stress ball
Art as how could you let this happen
Art as a gum-ball
Art as a tool to lure horny adults into a room
Art as a tool to lure wealthy adults into a room for your benefit
Art as to instrumentalize or use people as means
Art as an anchor point for philosophical conversation, or conversation alone
Art as a game of connecting the dots
Art as an object of affection, surrogate for a lover, sensual focal point
Art as something to grip, squeeze a piece of wood
Art as a submissive form that endures an onslaught of objectification and attention from lonely men
Art as backwash or the foamy water of a corporate fountain
Art as a luxury vibrator near a couch
Art as a placeholder for a sunset, a walk, or a getaway
Art as a point of sale
Art as a bandaid for a hole in the wall, or intellect
Art as suspect
Art as a way of saying something happened here. Something lives. Something is finished.
Art as a fiction of completion
Art as to feign
Art as only worthy if reducible to a compelling graphic image
Art as only relevant if reducible to a sentence, convenient, agreeable
Art as only relevant if able to be conveyed in an application
Art as first thought is best thought
Art as able to withstand the structures that determine cultural worth, why competitive
Art as a proclamation of style, fetish, or phenomenon
Art as a memento from the amusement park of capital
Art as proof of logging on or offline
Art as an old growth forest, derivative, alive in a changing network
Art as getting away with something
Art as deception, cowboy hat, fraud
Art as a device for manipulating matter, money, and people
Art as the site of acute healing, instigator of new mental pathways
Art as mirror
Art as an assistant working around the clock, with access to a rolodex of big shots, interlopers, acquaintances and spammers
Art as evidence of relations
Art as quid pro quo
Art as demonstration of technique and skill
Art as a mere mastery of technologies
Art as counter to the demographic of people who use the word “creatives”
Art as special effects, flamboyant, swirled up
Art as an endeavor to work the self out, exhaustive, unending
Art as a trail of crumbs for the teasing of rodents, pests, culture vultures
Art as flexing academic wherewithal
Art as pay me what I deserve, what you owe me, for what you stole from me
Art as embodied contradiction
Art as a consolidation of receipts
Art as an intake form
Art as a transfiguration of history in perceivable time and space
Art as a theatrical process, pretentious, active, generative
Art as thrashing, acting out, packaged
Art as an assemblage of matter within reach
Art as stalker, disembodied surveyor
Art as a prayer for something new, burden of something new, everyday
Art as a playing and pretending
Art as value determined by its accompanying condition report
Art as a pillowing silence or space
Art as ergonomic furniture, compliant
Art as non-compliance
Art as therapeutic aid, fun with miniatures
Art as a suspicious object to report on
Art as a rescue remedy
Art as a broader statement than if merely in words
Art as a binder of guidelines, rules, and contracts to abide by and obediently serve
Art as engaging in a world dominated by consumption
Art as insane fashion, don’t look at me
Art as a cat tower for healing, car got keyed, I am hungry, gum thrown in my hair because I was middle-school Wiccan
Art as a model for non-conformity swiftly adopted by dull businessmen somewhere far away
Art as the assembly is now in order
Art as a launchpad for imaginative living
Art as social security
Art as aphorism
Art as pithy undersides, juicy fruit, sticky, buggy, kid stuff
Art as a decomposing leaf
Art as a strategy towards world domination
Art as a whimsical authorization form
Art as I don’t want to talk about it yet
Art as research shows there is a human need to be seen
Art as a performance of the limits of technology and physics
Art as a confirmation of one’s existence, both independently and within a social system
Art as a playground for adults who know how to work with the play structures and know where the playground starts and stops
Art as a little bit of fun for only some people
Art as outlier
Art as invisible in this time, visible in future
Art as a major issue for cell phone storage, external hard drive
Art as seeing trash
Art as miraculously born out of precarious, hazardous practices
Art as an excuse for hoarding moldy cardboard, self-obsessed, anti-social, mentally unstable, perfectionist individuals’ tendencies to reside in garages
Art as a practice of believing, to stare for hours at a blob, I must do this, I must do this, I must do this, I must do this
Art as junk in the man cave
Art as esperanto, hopeful
Art as a repulsive selfie carnival
Art as a thumb to suck on
Art as a fantasy sport
Art as how does one survive
Art as the soft hardware of biological instruments
Art as an approachable door
Art as a functional or nonfunctional toilet
Art as pottery barn gone wild or gone weird
Art as an excuse to do anything and everything you want to do, privilege
Art as building a portfolio of slick images in order to get a high paying job, self interest
Art as a spicy snack that keeps you awake in the night, gives you unusual dreams
Art as unregulated extraction
Art as babysitting things
Art as co-opting
Art as self importance, self reliance, self sufficiency
Art as at a distance from logical knowledge
Art as the predictable or unpredictable next chapter of the story you thought you knew
Art as spiritual emergency, emergent property, private property
Art as it reminds me
Art as crescendo of waste, more things to account for
Art as exhibitionism, used to garner attention to self
Art as a catalogue of arbitrary phenomena
Art as meaning forcefully imbued into surfaces
Art as developing a language of one’s own, a room of one’s own
Art as preparing for a lead role
Art as remember the refresh button
Art as a choreography of sponges
Art as dark matter, presented in well-lit environments
Art as a non-scalable model
Art as a history of objects
Art as a prototype or thought form, caught momentarily in some physical form
Art as a tumbleweed, or snowballing into or out of rooms
Art as a concrete inquiry into the metaphysical
Art as destruction giving way for construction, or vise-versa
Art as a flimsy purpose
Art as self-direction, standing up, boss bitch
Art as a meditation-state dotted with trinkets
Art as an easily shareable search history
Art as a filtration system, Moon, Slumber, X-Pro II, relating with the world through subjects of interest
Art as breaking windows, breaking wind, broken speech
Art as a mess of languages, like a garage sale, with items of negotiable or non-negotiable value
Art as revealing subjectivities
Art as an assertion of ego
Art as power outlet
Art as digestive enzyme
Art as debt
Art as an inter-dimensional probe
Art as a lion outside of a house, moss grows quickly, witch’s manor
Art as gorgon girl, who turns those who behold her into stone
Art as something that at one point in time deserved to be explored
Art as a make and model of a vehicle
Art as an investment opportunity
Art as a body bag
Art as establishing feminist technologies to achieve equity among all genders
Art as individually establishing guidelines for mental health, workplace ethics, support
Art as sensitive guy
Art as a prefix, core, post novel
Art as to be a perfectionist, meaning to be uncompromising, not easily adaptable to others’ conditions, inconvenience
Art as programmable output, fantasy soundtrack
Art as dreaming in style
Art as to jam, inconsistently, preserves
Art as a sensitizing agent
Art as openings, closings, open forms, open shapes, closable matters
Art as a focal point, peaceful
Art as sensationalism, basketball hoops
Art as to capitalize on my crisis
Art as to look for love, to look for support
Art as symbolic or actual resting places for the dead, transient energies, or junk
Art as a napkin, watermarked with fingerprints
Art as a perverted rabbit hole
Art as for the time being
Art as able to circulate within a closed system
Art as able to circulate within an open system
Art as conceiving open dialogues
Art as care
Art as a focalization of the entire perceived universe
Art as energy maintained through transformation
Art as an engine
Art as how she walked so far in the week she thought there was no time left
Art as a liberatory language as ordinary as oatmeal
Art as the capability to identify oneself with anything
Art as what would it mean if
Art as a technique of centering
Art as boxed raisins
Art as a way to amuse a child, special needs
Art as a way to keep managers alive, while the artists are tormented with the expectation to produce their greatest hits
Art as the new renaissance of clip art
Art as deliverable via email, competing with Sketchers promotions
Art as something you bang your head against
Art as something you fall asleep on while trying to think
Art as a method of keeping up appearances
Art as spilling the contents of one’s wallet: ID cards, lucky penny, money, punch cards, all a scrambled mess, raisin stuck to foot
Art as expense, the long-term rewards of which are debatable
Art as avoiding or fabricating wilderness
Art as gripping narrative, representing only certain layers of a story, certain aspects of a system
Art as something men are forced to look at when they piss
Art as a measure of class, a feigning of class
Art as more expensive than poetry
Art as stale chips, passé, tolerable, something else completely
Art as a Scrub Daddy on view at MOMA
Art as or should this be a tweet
Art as a revelation of openings, not a revelation of content
Art as a claim
Art as a careerist enterprise
Art as disorganized questions, the puzzler wearing hats
Art as composite being daring others to understand it
Art as hee haw hee haw
Art as better in theory than in form
Art as constituted of transitional time, sunrise, sunset, loss
Art as empowered sadness
Art as grieving
Art as mending misunderstanding
Art as tending understanding
Art as responsibility
Art as conditioner
Art as accidentally stepping on a blackberry vine, ouch, it contains some medicine
Art as DO NOT TOUCH
Art as outrage
Art as regurgitated advertisement
Art as initiation
Art as attachment and submission
Art as the bitch goddess success
Art as campaigning
Art as conversion
Art as shop my feed
Art as changing exchange value
Art as an exploitation of one’s measurable achievements
Art as “She had an extraordinarily charged imaginative life”
Art as decorating the Whistleblower’s Retreat Center. Welcome
Art as a cat scratcher, temporarily satisfying primal impulses, eventually left shredded, laden with ants, fleas, worms, dust, neglected and dissolving into the garden