SWIMS SWIMS

SWIMS SWIMS

On October 15th, Willy Smart opens a new solo exhibition entitled SWIMS SWIMS as a continuation of our exhibition partnership with ACRE.

Opening Reception:
October 15th from 7 - 10pm

SWIMS SWIMS glides and soars too.

I recently dreamt of a paper airplane contest. A standard loophole for such contests is to wad a sheet and throw it baseball style. The design that flew farthest here though was an unfolded sheet, lifted and released gently, gliding parallel to the plane of the floor. Making a paper airplane is a good way to understand the motility of documents: a few folds of an 8.5 by 11 inch sheet of paper release the meaning of the sheet from whatever written content it floats to whatever air currents and aerodynamics now float the sheet itself. The unfolded dream airplane is ideal not only because it travels the greatest distance but because it indicates that folding isn’t needed to learn this lesson about transformation and transportability. The unfolded sheet too traverses. In its early 19th century usage, ‘headspace’ refers to the empty margin on the top of a page. We like to begin our written discourse here, where it’s white and empty. Of course headspace has never been empty. In 1977, Ornette Coleman releases his album Dancing in Your Head — headspace then as nightclub; not the bright white of the page, but murk and smoke. We can’t begin where it’s vacant because reading and writing and speaking and dancing are all matters primarily of adjacency. That’s not to say we need to make more noise: a fold is a kind of noise and the unfolded sheet flies fine. In the dream the airplanes aren’t made of paper but aluminum foil. The ideal plane has another attribute then: as it skims it reflects back to the ground and image of the ground and back to the sky an image of the sky. It is a pure surface. It sounds nice to get under there.

The Luminary's exhibitions are supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, Regional Arts Commission, Missouri Arts Council and our members.