Image courtesy of Dylan Mira
WRITING BODIES
September 9—October 10, 2015
Artists: Dylan Mira, Dean Daderko, Jess Arndt, robbinschilds, EJ Hill, Katherine Hubbard, Simone White, Michelle Boulé, and keyon gaskin
Curated by: Litia Perta
where are you right now as you read these words? what would it take for this text to pause you, make you breathe so full in that your nipples stretch out, take a flat warm palm down your flanks, thank your bodies just for being there...? what kind of textbody opens itself so that you can poke punch push at it, find its furry underbelly and stroke it so it grunts gently, murmurs...? what bodies of writing, what writing bodies, remind you that writing sounds like riding and gripping lets no blood in and everyone chortles and snorts sometimes and everybody gets bucked off...? but really––are you standing sitting shitting surfing subways riding lurching lying leaning ripping gripping slumping brimming bending falling sighing sipping as you're reading, faces sagging towards a screen?
writing bodies is a shifting constellation of art actions that generates questions, revelations, risks, fissures, sutures, slips around the practices, problems, pleasures, politics of being bodies––of being bodies written, of being bodies written out, of being bodies writing, of being bodies writing bodies, of being bodies that are unread, read, of being bodies yet unwritten. participants bounce stomp hover lie press fold rally in from fields to intertwine and write themselves, gnarled knotty questions, all again anew kneading politics and play––a play that does not resolve, one not tidy, one not to put away, one constant and undoing, not so much about consensus as through more choral forms and also their cacophonies. questions arise from forms uncomfortable and grammars unfamiliar bodies writing pages writing bodies writing spaces: interimplied and interwritten.
being legible is being clear enough to read and to be clear is to be free from all entanglements but the possibility of beings arises from the very tangle being bodies guarantees––a liminal state between tightening that tangle and trying to get oneself untied. undoing is becoming and tangling is what bodies do. to tangle means to disarrange, to make not tidy, to become unkempt. to disarrange assumptions about bodies that epidermalize or collapse into a singular sex, gender, sexuality, class, creed, ability, answer, anything, to disarrange the tenets of art markets that limit, tidy, resolve––these are the openings writing bodies plays between. the invitation is to come be with to not "get it" (as if meaning can be colonized or ever be an "it" to "get"), to say yes to waves and to undoings, to not hope for sense or clarity a thing that you can pocket, to open to the muddle of bodies writing bodies, of ways to be together and ways to be not one.
Litia Perta and EFA Project Space are grateful to the University of California, Irvine Hellman Fellowship Award for their generous support of this exhibition and for their continued support of junior faculty across the University of California system.
MATERIALS
SCHEDULE
Due to the live nature of Writing Bodies, drop-in hours occur during the planned schedule. When participants are not in the space, the gallery is closed.
Dylan Mira, "Irredeemable Tender"
Dean Daderko, "Untitled"
Jess Arndt, "Body Bridging: Paroxysms of Positive Defense"
robbinschilds, "HEXXED open studio practice"
EJ Hill, "Decade"
Katherine Hubbard, "cyclops and slashes"
Simone White, “'Poetry investigates new ways for people to get together and do stuff in the open, in secret.’”
Michelle Boulé, "Working towards The Monomyth"
keyon gaskin, "its not a thing"
RELATED EVENTS
Winter 2016, Just Speak Nearby: The Politics & Practice of Art Writing, a symposium at University of California, Irvine