LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- In Practice: Literally means collapse features newly commissioned sculptures, installations, and video works by eleven artists: Marco Barrera, Allen Hung-Lun Chen, Violet Dennison, Enrique Garcia, Ignacio Gatica, Cherisse Gray, Jessica Kairé, Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Alan Martín Segal, Stella Zhong, and Monsieur Zohore. Opening May 12, 2022, the exhibition presents new works and artistic meditations that consider an expanded notion of the ruin that includes social tradition as much as physical infrastructure. Literally means collapse is organized by 2022 In Practice Curatorial Fellow Camila Palomino.
From built environments and structures of circulation to protocols and belief systems that shape social and political subjects, infrastructures are in a constant generative friction with decay. Rituals of maintenance are designed and performed to prevent what is constructed from being subjectively ruined. Diagnosing a contemporary obsession with ruins, artist and theorist Svetlana Boym writes, “‘Ruin’ literally means ‘collapse’ — but actually, ruins are more about remainders and reminders.”[1] Boym elaborates that, as sites, they can trigger both potential nostalgias and imagined futures. Existing among ruins is existing among spaces of asynchronous time — of histories and timescales collapsed.
The artists in the exhibition trace collapse through material and metaphor. Some artists in the exhibition examine the failures of cities and other containers of information, working with and against the anxieties of deterioration. Some remind us of the strategic disintegration and flattening of symbols and aesthetics. Others embrace the breaking down of space, time, language, and other familiar logics. In Practice: Literally means collapse is a series of overlapping studies into timescales of ruin and what doesn’t yet remain.
Camila Palomino is an independent curator and researcher based in New York City. Her research is invested in the aesthetic relationships between imaging and security technologies, urban infrastructures, and social memory. Camila is currently curatorial assistant at the Vera List Center, the 2021-2022 Curator in Residence at Abrons Arts Center, and the 2022 In Practice Curatorial Fellow at SculptureCenter. She has previously held curatorial positions and contributed research to exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, The Drawing Center, and the 58th Carnegie International. She is a curatorial consultant at Amie Gross Architects on a project that commissions artworks by Queens-based artists for new affordable housing buildings in the borough. Camila has also been a visiting lecturer in The Photography Program at Bard College. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
[1] Svetlana Boym, “Ruinophilia,” in The Off-Modern (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
Artist Projects
Allen Hung-Lun Chen carves architectural elements from a Taiwanese temple as a meditation on the rituals of maintenance of structures and tradition, and as an offering to create a protective force around SculptureCenter’s building facade.
Inspired by an ancient ceremony performed at the Pantheon in Rome, Monsieur Zohore draws continuities between Catholic traditions and consumerism through an immersive sculptural installation.
By exhibiting two parallel archives, Marco Barrera uses waterways as a cursor to trace and connect minor histories of industrialization and infrastructure.
Violet Dennison continues a poetic and systematic exploration of code and encryption in a large-scale knotted installation.
In two site specific sculptural installations, Stella Zhong builds speculations of unseen spaces and alternative forms of gravitational forces.
In a video and sound installation, Alan Martín Segal examines overlapping temporalities of technologies and systems that undergird our cities and routines.
Jessica Kairé expands an ongoing practice of translating monuments into soft and foldable sculptures to question how memory and history are shaped in public space.
Through photography and bricolage, Enrique Garcia makes visible ongoing legacies of colonial power embedded in the design of public space in Mexico.
Ignacio Gatica merges his collection of mechanically modified political memorabilia watches with ongoing research into declassified CIA documents to index the legacy of U.S. intervention in Latin America.
Cherisse Gray assembles a site-specific installation and charged environment that upends traditions of architecture and ornament.
Fred Schmidt-Arenales presents a film re-enactment of archival meeting minutes from a series of meetings from the 1950’s at the University of Chicago that defined urban renewal strategies that continue today.
