MORE-THAN-ONE-AND-LESS-THAN-TWO is an exhibition organized by Susan Surface of videos, paintings, textiles, sculptures and environments at Gordilloscudder during Bushwick Gallery Late Night. Cammisa Buerhaus will perform on her Chroma Color Organ at 8pm.
The show connects each artist's work to Life Support, a conversation between painter Nick Dupree and anthropologist Zoë Wool about interdependence, power, and augmentation of the body -- from the mitochondria, to the lungs, out the mouth, along the rug, through the living room, via the machine, to the cosmos. As Nick and Zoë say:
Are we so in thrall to rugged individualism and man being "an island unto himself" that even dependence on air, which is what vent-dependent means, is cast as negative?
As we clumsily and uneasily stumble forward into a piecemeal cyborgian society, there will be more like me, whose existence as a co-existence with numerous relationships, social programs and technologies supporting life can’t be ignored. The interdependent "assemblages" that support all our lives —incompatible with the typical conceptions of individualism, self-sufficiency and self-defense. But when you’re wearing part of your respiratory system in front of you as easily as businessmen wear ties and every movement happens with assistance from the people around you, interdependence is irretrievably foregrounded.
As we clumsily and uneasily stumble forward into a piecemeal cyborgian society, there will be more like me, whose existence as a co-existence with numerous relationships, social programs and technologies supporting life can’t be ignored. The interdependent "assemblages" that support all our lives —incompatible with the typical conceptions of individualism, self-sufficiency and self-defense. But when you’re wearing part of your respiratory system in front of you as easily as businessmen wear ties and every movement happens with assistance from the people around you, interdependence is irretrievably foregrounded.
Like all of us, Nick is interdependent with technology–his user interface. His drawings are an extension of that technological relationship.
In pictures it's hard to tell if Camissa is playing an instrument or a room. Plumbing for a room, plumbing for a body, and plumbing for an instrument become indivisible. Pipes in an instrument are pipes in you, they seem to say.
Similar melting of categories occurs in Robin's prosthetic brick wall for our brick wall. Mitch's animation toys with machines that would merge boundaries between human and machine through new haptic gestures. Brookhart makes a lightbulb into an artery. Their works absorb other bodies into the disciplinary boundary of engineering, conceiving a person or body as an instrument/machine.
In pictures it's hard to tell if Camissa is playing an instrument or a room. Plumbing for a room, plumbing for a body, and plumbing for an instrument become indivisible. Pipes in an instrument are pipes in you, they seem to say.
Similar melting of categories occurs in Robin's prosthetic brick wall for our brick wall. Mitch's animation toys with machines that would merge boundaries between human and machine through new haptic gestures. Brookhart makes a lightbulb into an artery. Their works absorb other bodies into the disciplinary boundary of engineering, conceiving a person or body as an instrument/machine.
So that was the feeling of you breathing. But also, in a way, of you being breathed, and the tube being breathed, and a whole sociomaterial assemblage in the midst of its animation.
Cammisa Buerhaus is a sculptor and transmission artist based in New York City. As resident curator of sound and performance at CAGE, she investigates sound and spatial reasoning from a feminist perspective. She is known for her sculptural instruments.
Nick Dupree's highly textured, immersive self-portraits and parallel worlds are all made digitally with a trackball mouse and the limited mobility of his thumb. He is a writer and activist who has been on forms of mechanical ventilation since 1992, and is best known for "Nick's Crusade," his campaign which resulted in a new Medicaid program to extend home care past age 21 for vent-dependent residents of Alabama.
Robin Kang's textiles and architectural structures mimic industrial production through repetition and pattern creation. The history of connections between textiles and electronics inspires her tapestry work, which is created utilizing a digitally operated Jacquard loom: the contemporary version of the first binary-operated machine. In BRXL, transparent plastic bricks are manufactured overseas, then constructed like tapestries to form unstable, mobile walls.
Brookhart Jonquil's work treats space and architecture as information carried by light. Power Split consists of a common work-light, the electrical cord to which has been sliced along its length. The divided plug is inserted into two separate electrical outlets. The piece can bridge outlets across a room, or even two separate buildings - a configuration that challenges not only architectural structures, but economic structures and the abstract concept of energy ownership.
Mitch Patrick has built several 3d printers and a CNC plotter to extend his hand and consciousness via machine. His studio practices include video, 3D rendering, and DIY digital fabrication. These practices investigate the function of pixels in digital images through the use of generative topography.
Nick Dupree's highly textured, immersive self-portraits and parallel worlds are all made digitally with a trackball mouse and the limited mobility of his thumb. He is a writer and activist who has been on forms of mechanical ventilation since 1992, and is best known for "Nick's Crusade," his campaign which resulted in a new Medicaid program to extend home care past age 21 for vent-dependent residents of Alabama.
Robin Kang's textiles and architectural structures mimic industrial production through repetition and pattern creation. The history of connections between textiles and electronics inspires her tapestry work, which is created utilizing a digitally operated Jacquard loom: the contemporary version of the first binary-operated machine. In BRXL, transparent plastic bricks are manufactured overseas, then constructed like tapestries to form unstable, mobile walls.
Brookhart Jonquil's work treats space and architecture as information carried by light. Power Split consists of a common work-light, the electrical cord to which has been sliced along its length. The divided plug is inserted into two separate electrical outlets. The piece can bridge outlets across a room, or even two separate buildings - a configuration that challenges not only architectural structures, but economic structures and the abstract concept of energy ownership.
Mitch Patrick has built several 3d printers and a CNC plotter to extend his hand and consciousness via machine. His studio practices include video, 3D rendering, and DIY digital fabrication. These practices investigate the function of pixels in digital images through the use of generative topography.
I can't wait for this. Guess I'll see you on Saturday during Bushwick Gallery Late Night!