exhibition history
Evaldas Jansas
Joys
Joys
Jan 01 2024
One of the earliest Lithuanian video works was Evaldas Jansas’ “Linkejimai/Wishes,” which was filmed in 1998, on the days leading up to New Year’s Eve. In ‘Linkejimai’ Jansas asks passersby in various locales, on the street; in bars; and at the contemporary art centre, what they wish for themselves and for others. Jansas invites strangers to articulate their values, fantasies, anxieties and epistemologies.
Stills from Evaldas Jansas’ "Linkejimai/Wishes" (1998) Digital Video. 23:01 duration.
A.J. Medland, Sarai Stephens
Crutch Contemporary
Nov 08 — Dec 09 2019
The question still gets asked ‘what is art?’ But the subtext of that question seems to be, ‘is it real?’ Is art capable of being a medium of truth? Well, if art cannot be a medium of truth then art would only be a matter of taste, and if art was only a matter of taste, then the art spectator becomes more important than the art producer. Imagine the implications of this. Imagine an individual that cannot experience the possibilities of her own actions, the pleasure, or the limitations of them. The aesthetic relies entirely on the assumption that the individual is capable of responsibility, for producing this work, by undertaking that artistic action. Otherwise, if art is not a medium of truth, we are only made real by a Panopticon with no one sitting at the well. Art is a medium of truth when it is personal responsibility.
‘What is art?’ Art is Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. Or in the words of my favourite poet, “art is a fistfight in the orchestra pit.” ‘What is art?’ Art is writing before you learn how to read. Because before thought, it must have been poetry. If “contemporary art is an art to survive our contemporaneity” then the aesthetic is our integrity of thought outside language. Recall George W. Bush, as the primacy of language, at a podium proclaiming “You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.” And if you still maintain that language is the measure of validity, do recall that a picture is worth a thousand words. Art is a stray dog, following you through a field of lilac trees on the outskirts of Vilnius. An eternal reoccurrence poised like a crossroads, as if our generosity and willingness to engage with that which offers us no utility, instead offers us a mirror to our humanity.
Sarai Stephens works from gestural abstraction and a love of craft. Her overworked compositions are jarring, sensual and humorous. Stephens often imagines herself in a cave, and what life would be like in a place that has no real light, connected to a device whose only function projects flat images of what other people in other caves are doing.
Press:
TZVETNIK
A.J. Medland, Sarai Stephens, “OUTstanding Figure” (2019) newspaper pulp, drywall compound, glue, flour, recycled plastics, 68” x 42” x 16”.
Sophia Oppel
Crutch Contemporary
Oct 05 — 27 2019
The glass around you shatters as you glide through this infinite space, like a drone ready to exert a pre-emptive strike. Inhabiting plazas of chrome and marble, clinical, anemic trees shift in a cruel air-conditioned breeze. Vast anesthetic vistas of self, you were a protagonist in an infinitely looping trailer; like an avatar, you became immaterial. Now, this space, supposedly user friendly, intuitive, ever navigable, is a cacophonous maze of wrong-turns.
Placelessness in Parallel
Press:
Journal FYI
Installation view.
Garrett Lockhart, Nikki Woolsey, Suzanna Zak
Crutch Contemporary
Jul 12 — Aug 11 2019
Hope is a duty from which paleontologists are exempt. Their job is to take the long view, the cold and stony view, of triumphs and catastrophes in the history of life. They study teeth, tree trunks, leaves, pollen, and other biological relics, and from it they attempt to discern the lost secrets of time, the big patterns of stasis and change, the trends of innovation and adaptation and refinement and decline that have blown and evaporated, like sea winds among ancient creatures in ancient ecosystems. Although life is their subject, death and burial supply all their data. This gives to paleontologists a certain distance, a perspective beyond the reach of anxiety over outcomes of the struggles they chronicle. If “hope is the thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickinson said, then it's good to remember that feathers don't generally fossilize well.
- Garrett Lockhart (b. 1994, Nanaimo, B.C., Canada) received his Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. He is a co-director of Calaboose, an independent project space located in a converted carriage house in Montreal.
Nikki Woolsey (b. 1983, Toronto) graduated from OCAD University in 2008. Her sculptures consider the perceived significance and categorization of objects. Unravelling these understandings, her materials are put through a process of intuitive reconfiguration and deliberate fabrication.
Suzanna “Suzie” Zak (b. 1990, Moscow) received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in Sculpture in 2019. Her practices straddles between the mediums of sculpture and photography. She is the 2019 teaching fellow for the Yale Prison Education Initiative.
Press:
TZVETNIK
Journal FYI
Installation view.
Zeesy Powers, Angus Tarnawsky, Anton Vidokle
Crutch Contemporary
Jul 07 2019
Today the Russian philosophy known as Cosmism has been largely forgotten. Its utopian tenets – combining Western Enlightenment with Eastern philosophy, Russian Orthodox traditions with Marxism – inspired many key Soviet thinkers until they fell victim to Stalinist repression. In this three-part film project, artist Anton Vidokle probes Cosmism’s influence on the twentieth century and suggests its relevance to the present day.
In Zeesy Powers’ virtual reality work “This Could Be You” the viewer inhabits the body of an algorithmically-generated 90-year-old woman, naked and battered by the refuse of the information worker. VR is positioned as a technology of infinity: you can be anyone, anywhere, doing anything; and yet, as Zeesy reminds users, its practices are also those of confinement: where you find yourself trapped in a space limited by sensors, the length of a cable, and the limits of someone else’s imagination.
A performance by Angus Tarnawsky explores sound through an assembled orchestra of radio frequencies.
Zeesy Powers was the 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the Toronto Animated Image Society, for which she produced "This Could be You," an interactive piece exploring practices of confinement in VR. Powers has been an invited observer and participant in international telecommunications and cybersecurity conferences for military-industrial, corporate and activist realms. Powers is a 2018 Chalmers Fellow, through this she continues her research into how our digital tools shape the ways we relate to ourselves and others.
Angus Tarnawsky is an Australian artist and musician. His work considers perceptions of sound and space, existing in many hybrid forms across composition, relational aesthetics, and installation. Recent exhibitions and presentations have been hosted by Pioneer Works, Fridman Gallery, Wave Farm (New York), and Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam/New York). Originally from Tasmania, he studied improvisation and electroacoustic music at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne before relocating to New York City in 2010.
Still from Anton Vidokle’s “Immortality For All: a film trilogy on Russian Cosmism” (2014-2017) HD video, color, sound. 96:00 duration. Russian with English subtitles.
Sean Stewart
Crutch Contemporary
May 24 — Jun 30 2019
if catastrophe lies before us,
then it flows from what’s come before
deep beside my swim in you
eyes, hollow,
trees, crimson,
haltering, cast into night, doorways,
beneath the wind, hand, us
I melt waving to dawns of terrible swans
sticks drumming in my bone
Press:
Canadian Art
TZVETNIK
Installation view.
Jawa El Khash
Crutch Contemporary
Apr 12 — May 12 2019
Just like the monarch butterfly, I too am an immigrant that has migrated 2000 miles away from home, looking for a place to rest. Just like the caterpillar that becomes a monarch, to protect my self from predators, I match my skin colour to the same shade of green of my milky plant, to render myself invisible. As I shed my skin, I will do it again, and again, and again. After four weeks of eating milkleaves, and shedding four skins, my cells are ready to morph, to grow. I will need to find a spot to metamorphose safely, as this body as I know it is no longer mine. My time with these six legs and sixteen eyes is over, and it is time for me to move on, to crystallize and fly. I find a spot to hang upsidedown from, the silk I radiate carries the weight of my body. I thread myself a cocoon, and trust that this will hold me as I transform. Trusting in the ability of my body to create magic and to take me into my next life. As I find the leaf, branch, and root that will hold me through metamorphosis, to be the place of birth for my next life, I change the hues of my skin to match my environment, protecting myself in this delicate transformative process.
Are you ready to fly, to crystallize, to have wings?
Jawa El Khash (born 1995, Damascus) is a multidisciplinary artist that uses virtual reality, holography and painting to investigate nature, architecture, and immigrant refugee culture.
Press:
It’s Nice That
Stills from “The Upper Side of the Sky” (2019) VR, 10:00 duration.
Grayson Alabiso-Cahill
Tony Cokes
Crutch Contemporary
Feb 08 — Mar 24 2019
Grayson Alabiso-Cahill is interested in radical mythologies, in the unruly birthplaces of popular uprisings, and in the rose-tinted and often troubling nostalgia of young and masculine leftism. The Paris Commune seems to mark the beginning of a new kind of political action; one that is photographed and surveilled; that is performed and propagandistic; that is celebratory and popular. The instability of both the photograph and the barricade play a role in how the narrative of the Commune is constructed, and this tension between urgency and historicity carries with it lessons to untangle in the present day. Using the gallery as an ad-hoc pedagogic site, this project takes the form of a transient installation, a series of workshops, and several multiples. The transiency of this installation nods to the ways in which any reading of a history is revisionist: punctum, narcissism, and instinct are used as tools by Alabiso-Cahill to guide his reading of an event that made a lasting impact on the superstructure of Socialist thought.
In “Black Celebration,” Tony Cokes merges newsreel footage of riots in the 1960s with popular music and text commentary to create a counter-reading of rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital; as an attempt to de-fetishize commodity through theft and gift. Subtitled “A Rebellion against the Commodity,” this reading of the urban black riots of the 1960s references Guy Debord’s Situationist text “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy” alongside commentary adapted from Barbara Kruger, Morrissey, and the Canadian Industrial band Skinny Puppy. Tony Cokes’ practice questions how our modes of political and civic articulation are guided and shaped by media image circulation, and how that in turn defines the horizon of emancipatory struggles. Asking audiences, “How do people make history under conditions pre-established to dissuade them from intervening in it?”
Tony Cokes lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. Recent exhibitions include the 10th Berlin Biennale in Berlin; Hessel Museum in Annandale-on-Hudson; the Whitechapel Gallery in London; ZKMin Karlsruhe; REDCAT in Los Angeles; SFMOMA in San Francisco; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Pera Museum in Istanbul; and the Louvre in Paris.
Press:
Collaged
In Words and Parades
Still from Tony Cokes’ "Black Celebration" (1988) Digital video, 17:11 duration, b/w.
Lumír Hladík
Bunker 2 Contemporary
Mar 15 — Apr 1 2018
When acts of unsanctioned creativity are categorized as treason against the state, every movement, every moment, can become a form of rebellion. Within communist Czechoslovakia artist Lumír Hladík was an integral catalyst for ‘action art,’ a term used to denote public and private performance work. These happenings ranged from the critical to the absurd, but all represented a type of artistic freedom that was suppressed under communist censorship.
Still from "The Never Boulder," Hill Klepec near Úvaly, Czech Republic, 1978.