upend the air

upend the air

September 8th -
November 10th, 2017

upend the air is a far-reaching group exhibition featuring KP Brehmer, Gareth Long, Mario Navarro, Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba, Jimena Sarno, and Brian Zimmerman exploring states of suspension, exception, solidity, and escape.

Opening Reception:
September 8th from 7 - 10pm

From the colloquial epithet everything is up in the air to Marx and Engel's well-circulated phrase all that is solid melts into air we imagine that if the ground is synonymous with stability, then a state of suspension is its inverse.

As capital apparently dematerializes us all, how do we locate lines of flight? As instability is made inevitable, is air a force that frames us? And, if we find this state unsatisfactory, can we upend the air, amend it, or bend it towards other forms?

From Brehmer’s foundational “Capitalist Realism” critiques to Ruvalcaba’s lyrical mediations on the dematerialization of the art object alongside the rise of neoliberalism’s just-in-time precarity, the persistent weightlessness of the present is on view. Mario Navarro’s chrome and concrete works hover between the solidity of the architectural ruin and near-violent suspension of stone middair. Likewise, Jimena Sarno’s recreation of Trotsky’s chicken coop while in exile carries an uneasy solidity of history as it hangs overhead.

Zimmerman’s torso-less figure holds up the all-too-common clearance chatter that ‘everything must go’ though it is all already on its way out. Finally, Gareth Long’s textile curtain and accompanying graphite drawing draws on Homer’s lost comedy of Magrites to ask whether despite increased access to information and widespread knowledge, stupidity is here celebrated as a virtue, a generative means of production, and an alternative model of thought.