ART-PRESENTATION: Between the Ticks of the Watch
What we understand to be true is continually honed by the movement between certainty and questioning, knowledge and doubt. This struggle is often deeply familiar, whether through the personal trials of religious faith or the constant revision of once-accepted bodies of knowledge, but it also reaches into many other diverse spheres of experience.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Renaissance Society Archive
The exhibition “Between the Ticks of the Watch” at The Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, presents a platform for considering doubt as both state of mind and pragmatic tool. The exhibition traces how doubt can eat away at the foundation of understanding itself, calling into question the very possibility of knowledge or at least demanding recognition of its limitations. The works offer glimpses of how the condition of doubt permeates questions of identity, the construction of language, the motivations for abstraction, and the drive to political resistance. In a newly commissioned installation and performance, “Your face is/is not enough”, Kevin Beasley presents 12 sculptures that incorporate megaphones and gas masks. These objects repurpose symbols of control that are standard issue equipment in police departments, usually worn as protection by those in power but here modified and recontextualized as potential tools for challenging the status quo. Peter Downsbrough’s works are marked by an investigation into the spatial possibilities of words and the linguistic possibilities of space, revealing how our relationships to both language and spaces are always in flux. Words appear on the wall or floor, further suggesting conjunctions or disjunctions. Science, religion, and magic form a backdrop for the work of Goutam Ghosh, who looks to them as providing different ways of deciphering the same worldly phenomena, as well as offering visual points of reference, such as the hint of an orderly grid. Martha Wilson’s photographs scrutinize standard notions of individual identity, delving into the ways people conform to standard types or how they might occupy more uncertain spaces in between. In “Portfolio of Models”, Wilson “tries on” the various “models” of womanhood held out to her in the ‘70s, such as “Earth Mother” or “The Working Girl”, ultimately finding that none of them fit. In the “Posturing” series, Wilson further amplifies the malleability of identity and the ambiguity of interpersonal experience. The video “The value in mathematics (language)”, by Falke Pisano, centers on a conversation between the artist and two mathematicians as they discuss how closer evaluation can undermine what are otherwise considered to be objective truths or universal principles. An accompanying sculpture, “Negotiations in Exchange”, further draws out the direct and indirect relations to power that frequently go unnoticed. Participating artists: Kevin Beasley, Peter Downsbrough, Goutam Ghosh, Falke Pisano and Martha Wilson
Info: Curator: Solveig Øvstebø, The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Cobb Hall, Chicago, Duration: 24/4-26/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-17:00, Sat0-sun 12:00-17:00, http://renaissancesociety.org
