alex joins

senior show

mary alexandra joins, senior exhibition at the cooper union 2016

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As oil paint oxidizes, the air around causes the unsaturated fatty acids found in the oil to harden in what is described as a siccative (CITE) process. Latex paint, on the other hand, transforms through the more known process of evaporation. Or better-stated evaporation up-to-a-certain-point. After the water has evaporated the chemicals in the latex paint cure and bind, which gives one the ability to run as many Mr. Clean® Magic Erasers up and down the walls of a gallery without ever damaging the permanent substrate of whiteness upon which dirt accumulates. One could describe similar processes in plaster, epoxy, resin, silicone, and a variety of other materials which are all bound together into cousinly groups around terms like drying, curing, setting and hardening.

These material qualities are known. They can describe quite well how things come into a space—a gallery—as objects. They also qualify through materiality, as if sculptors and painters still shared a set of ethics with alchemists, rather than following the recipe on a label. In a sense the justification being that the known unknown of paint drying, curing, setting and hardening adds an acceptable mystique. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has perfected this sleight of hand, making even the most emotive artist seem tragically secular in their devotion to known unknowns.

But once this knowably-unknown process is over. What’s there? A book, a sapling, 120,000.000 USD, a film of x or a sheet of y, a block of color and a stroke. A group of works that are indulgent in the poetics of naming things. A blissful “Bizarre and Ornamental Alphabet,” hinting at the indexical and the Chinese encyclopedia; the two bodies of Ryan and Alex moving towards you dead-pan, then each making quarter turns opposite to each other nodding at the specters of art school, Rosalind and Jorge Luis, before finishing the rotation and walking back up the catwalk. Maybe the lyrics to this performance lead you on to think that the performers are smarter than you thought, or maybe they are just catchy. The doubt on this matter could also be categorically called a known unknown.

It is hard to say if there is a subject to this show—another known unknown. Lesson’s learned or hard fought struggles could be contenders for thematic subheadings. In-tandem would be my preferred line, but the moon also entered libra’s house when I started writing this down. But in-tandem fits with the work too and not just with my hypersensitivity to goings-on of the astrological world. The Scale of Culture (Concubine) goes hand-in-hand with this line of thought. So do the duo of She Electrocuted Herself With Her Own Bathwater and The Real Poetry is Beyond Us, Breaking Like Glue (Agnes the Atom). All three of these being great pedestals as well as great works of art.

But back to the drying, curing, setting and hardening. (And at this point I’ll add in downloading, rendering, uploading and burning).

Once its done what’s here? Paintings, sculptures, videos, effigies, tombstones, cairns, figures? It’s really too tedious to say much beyond that there are objects here. Some of them are of the first degree; a folded sheet of dried and cured latex paint folded into a book and given a name. Others are friends, found and borrowed, with all that comes with that. Keeping each other company. Finding a sense of belonging in the gallery and talking to each other in ways we have not yet evolved to understand. It’s hard to think that they were there before us, but it’s a geological fact that rock in the shape of a dog looking for it’s owner lost at sea was having some conversation before that asinine and sappy story existed.

— Eduardo Andres Alfonso, 2016

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Bliss, Bliss, Bizarre, and Ornamental Alphabets

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