Veronica

October 2019
October 5 – November 2, 2019

manuel arturo abreu
Gretchen Bennett
Demian DinéYazhi’ and R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance and Empowerment
Jeff Guess
Christian Alborz Oldham, et al.
Jaakko Pallasvuo
Aurora San Miguel
Micah Schippa
Bogosi Sekhukhuni
Charles Stobbs and Neo Gibson

Counterclockwise

Time passes, despite the pleasant conversation.

Transition: Funny Nerd Or Geek Looking To Flying Cloud With Rotating Clock Icon

Micah Shippa’s text arrangements are ruinous remainders; fallen, horizontal columns of fragmented language. They are centered in aporia, more omission than prose, less stanza than break. These emergent interferences are pushed to the edges of deletion. The wall works, all titled Sculpture, remind us of their objectness. They also remind us of language as material, of language as tool. When a tool breaks, its parts are salvaged or discarded. The Heap of Language has been depleted, and instead we have remnants “Rubbing salt into the eyes” on cellophane surfaces. Shippa’s sculptures don’t traffic in dread; rather, they focus on the uncanny sublimity of the isolated phrase, and the decay of the infrastructure used to ensnare them in context.

Transition: Close-up of a calendar with fast flipping pages. Shot with green screen background.

Inky photocopies of script and tattered pages printed on canvas, these glimpses of the archive morph to asemic channelings with spiritual static-cling in manuel arturo abreu’s Herramienta, FamilySearch series. A décollage of family ties, the digitized Dominican civil records, each presented on their own terms of legibility, depict a poetry of cryptic revealing.

Transition: TOP VIEW: Marking (round) a numbers in a calendar — Stop motion

Aurora San Miguel’s glass bottles house hybrid beings mid-mitosis, somewhere between PeaRoeFoam and the new lab-grown bacteria genetically built to eat it. Oozy and metabolic, they simultaneously suggest breakdown and absorption.

Transition: Alarm Clock Jumping Towards Camera With Blue Pastel Background.

“I revoke all spiritual contracts with Earth-based media systems using domination and control as a means of energy harvesting, fear instigation, or reality manipulation with energetic propaganda technologies.” Bogosi Sekhukhuni announces it is time to receive equity court’s decree of total energy consciousness. Go revoke all agreements to the ontological Terms & Conditions. He’s on another plane, psycling in the Windows Media Player Visualizer Zone Distortion Portal, a beacon in the fabric of minutes and liquid gears. “Doesn’t this feel like déjà vu?” The Akashic records vibrate.

Transition: Extreme Close Up Shot Of Clock Hands Moving From 8:07 To 9:12 In 4K Time Lapse

With Gretchen Bennett, we head home to harvest, cornless, lost in a maze between LA and southern Oregon. We drive beneath the billboard arrangements on that path, where “the moon rises, gets pretty high. Arcs into a band of moons over distance and time.” The mezzanine is breathing; life’s waiting room is green-screened into a field of repeating signs, constructing hospital walls and translucent bags. Somewhere in the mind’s permafrost, we’re lost, taken away, “ASAP forever.”

Transition: Timelapse of sun rays emerging through the dark storm clouds in the mountains.

Demian DinéYazhi’ looks through and adapts Zoe Leonard’s blockbuster poem “I want a president” in a continuation of R.I.S.E.’s use of vinyl lettering on gallery and institution windows. The new poem, entitled We don’t want a president…, faces out towards the street. This work differs from other DinéYazhi’ vinyl works, which are legible from within the gallery space. While those works implicate the viewer and their perception of the landscape beyond the gallery, We don’t want a president instead addresses passersby. In doing so it takes on a new life, making plain the demand for an end to “white settler critique of settler colonialism and genocide unless it centers Indigenous, Brown, & Black livelihood.” The poem, hovering on the glass, presents itself in red and black, strikethroughs laid bare, envisioning “never having to comprehend the need to defend ourselves.”

Transition: Business Concept Rotating Gears Mechanic Mechanical Machine

Friedrich Kittler is a geist of the timeline, updating endlessly in character limit purgatory. His ventriloquist, Jeff Guess, built an algorithmic demon to outsource this role. Kittler’s zombie texts reify his hardware ontologies: Kittlerbot becomes the chorus to his own phantom legacy.

Transition: 2D vector animation of an upward graph showing growth and charting progress.

How can a flat sound lay down like a calendar and weep on the asphalt of its month’s transmission? In the Stobbs-Gibson tradition, its lifespan is cloudlike, presence zonal, imageless but still wreathing, adorning, surrounding like architectural weather. In tectonic allegiance, tones form the total sound: Maximus.

Transition: Cartoon circle, clock transition. Hand-Drawn Transitions 24fps motion graphics package features animation pack of hand-drawn dynamic and fun transitions with alpha channel. Easy to use and customize.

Jaakko Pallasvuo ponders a thousand-eyed, tryptophilic tablet; or highly punctuated sock. Craters are seen from aerial drone perspectives. We are reminded that rare earth minerals poison the earth with their extraction, all the while partitioning meaning-making into our individual screens. These punctuations stigmata flex for Prezi tradition. The stock image and its thorn crown coronation begets dubious inclusions from the grunge rock eco-sector. In my dream, a wounded Bataille comes crawling in tattered denim and fishnets, crooning: “Sell the kids for food / Weather changes moods…”

Transition: FLIP TEXT / Switch Chart & Clock Animation

Christian Oldham (& co.) sent me a video. A bird’s in the lavender bush...but what kind of bird is it? It’s lost in an ambient waterfall of culled digital detritus: smartphone reflux, search results, image peels. Garments orbit “Charisma engineering as core competency” and “A typical neoliberal glamorous institution activity pie chart.” The phone dump comes in evasive spurts of jpeg, each email missive anchored at the ends by hard pucks of Gide. These scripts always find ways of entering through our perforations. Everything’s going to be alright, though. “Candles FTW.” 

Transition: woman showing a blank agenda. She doesn't have any plans: calendar is clear

– Barrett White