Jayne H. Baum

Susanna Cole and Erin Donnelly

Elena Filipovic

Ingrid LaFleur

Trong G. Nguyen

Olu Oguibe

Chika Okeke

Sandhini Poddar

Praxis

Ashkan Sahihi

Marketa Uhlirova

(It’s like Tom Wolfe…ever read electric kool aid acid test? Trying to use language to capture alternative social movements and altered states, not just describe them...)

Who’s that in the corner over there? How did you get there? What are you doing there? Just breathing? Just waiting? Just watching? Just spying? (Thank God, it isn’t “artspeak”. I was thinking about turning into the trained monkey or the museum exhibit- “see the living artist” because I am becoming someone who speaks in memorized sound bites... so my first thought was relief that it doesn’t scan like a piece from October magazine).

In a post 9/11 world with surveillance technology that can zoom in onto a split hair, (very cinematic) Deborah Aschheim’s nodes and tentacles and synapses and pods offer up multiple fragments of ourselves as viewers and voyeurs. (That’s the tension; I even think it’s like a trinity, like: observer- the neutral, omniscient, quasi-scientific “legitimate” authority; viewer- the passive educational/entertainment consumer; voyeur- the furtive spy or illicit peeper). There is no single point in the room where you can get the full picture. Be omniscient, or omnipresent for that matter (...the classical/religious idea of omniscience giving way to the new idea of omnipresence generated by technology, i.e., we can exist in multiple places simultaneously, we can even exist after death and before memory via recorded media…).

It’s all about choosing, about being in the right place at the right time. Or perhaps you miss everything. It doesn’t really matter. The baby cams and TV screens, shrouded in low-tech bath mats from Home Depot aka permeable exoskeletons with suction cups and osmotic membranes, look out, look around, look back at us. We watch people looking at art, the cameras on the streets relay back information within, spy cams and the monster in the closet reveal truths (hopefully it will be like a secret womb of the house or something gestating... my sister is in her third trimester, watching the baby change positions inside her body… you could see sort of body parts through her skin, and how it was like something out of the alien movies, this thing inside her that is normal and weird at the same time, part of her but like a parasite or foreign invader… changing her body from a human body into something else and she has to just wait and see what it develops into...and it is feeding off her...), and inconsistencies: spontaneity and the unmasking of conditioning.

The endless tubes and wires are microcosms of urban sprawl. (I made this list in Pittsburgh: lightning. circuit boards. cell phone call routing patterns. cities that are loops, concentric circles of urban grid. internet backbone, links of servers and routers. neural wiring. airline flight paths. heart-lungs-arteries-veins-capillaries. labyrinth of freeways. spider webs, networks of vibration, sensing networks, networks of transmission. rivers + tributaries). One installation grows into the next, the third, the fourth, and so on, cutting out the inevitable commodification of the object: it becomes difficult to possess. There are no frames, nothing to be sold per square inch. It’s all about the organism, being orgiastic, devouring commerce and spitting it out. An alternative way of being. (This is consumption in the 21c because we don’t really own things, it’s just the comfort of the myth of ownership- we possess or consume them, but they are designed to break/become obsolete/be replaced by immediate successive generations, so that the idea of possessions in the collecting sense- heirlooms, durable solid objects based on a concept of permanence- is a myth now, but we can’t let it go... really we like subscribe to technology objects or we “enter into a relationship” with them, they are too shifting and elusive to possess, and it’s a reciprocal relationship anyhow...we have to learn about them and adapt to them in order to use them... so it’s much more like the relationship you have with a living being or a person even).

I have one word for you: institutionalization. More like Hans Haacke way back when, than Fred Wilson nowadays. (A throwaway instead of a claim or critical thesis)

Parallel existences interest the artist. She has always shown in non-profit spaces around the country. A believer in serendipity and collaboration… we never know what might come of things. Certainly, most gallerists have nightmares. Parallel existences also interest her collaborator, the curator in this case, who hasn't been able to figure it all out as yet. Pinpoint the conclusion. (But ask the relevant questions. Set a rhythm.) Establish the plan of action. We'll see how it goes when we both meet at NGC 224 in mid October. (Can't wait)

-Sandhini Poddar

About the curator
Sandhini Poddar trained as an art historian in Indian and South East Asian aesthetics and antiquities in India, where she received her Masters degrees from Bombay University. In 2003, she completed a Masters in Visual Arts Administration degree from New York University, and has been working at the CUE Art Foundation in Chelsea, New York, since it opened to the public in fall 2003. She is the co-curator for the group exhibition Figures of Thinking: Convergences in Contemporary Cultures, along with Vicky A. Clark, that is touring US university museums until February 2008 under the auspices of Pamela Auchincloss/ Arts Management. The exhibition catalogue will be published in October 2005.