Details of: Laurie Kang, Channeller, 2019, steel, conduit, airline cable, unfixed and unprocessed photographic paper and darkroom chemicals (continually sensitive), duratrans, magnets, hardware, dimensions variable; Amanda Turner Pohan, io or IO or 1 0 or a slow leak, 2019, metallic bronze alphabet balloons, helium, monofilament wire, 36 x 40 x 6 inches; Nikita Gale, FIXED LOOP I, 2018, concrete, polyurethane foam, terrycloth, steel, 115 × 22 × 13 inches.
Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum
Nikita Gale, Laurie Kang, and Amanda Turner Pohan
Organized by Mira Dayal and Simon Wu
April 4 - May 8, 2019
Opening reception: Thursday, April 4, 6-8PM
CUE Art Foundation is pleased to present Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum, a group exhibition featuring Nikita Gale, Laurie Kang, and Amanda Turner Pohan, organized by Mira Dayal and Simon Wu. Formula 1 is an expanded exhibition project exploring alternative potentials for data-collection. What does it mean to make a formula? Is a formula a guarantee, a container, an act of “capturing” the means of producing something? Probing the networked nature of formula- and exhibition-making processes, the curatorial premise began with a public invitation to submit formulas for “successful” works of contemporary art. For Formula 1, each artist produced new work partially in response to selected formulas from the call and partially as continuations of their past investigations.
#2: Goopy material + detritus + render-y still-life arrangement = new-agey post-capitalist commentary on waste/ecology
#5: personal data + visualization + surveillance society = abstract 2-d work
#10: Science + identity politics + live element = contemporary art
#43: (Artist Collaborators +/- Non-Artist Specialists +/- Non-Artist Non-Specialists) + Content from Multiple Diverse Disciplines + Performativity + An Institutional Frame = Artworks That Establish Both An Environment And A Logic of Relation To A Newly Self-Constituted Audience And By Opening Such A Space Hasten The Dissolution of Compromised Modes of Understanding
#51: architectural tools + collected ecological detritus = ecosystem-like sculpture
#68: v1 = source code; v2 = fragrance; v3 = prosthesis; v4 = time, sum = a body,
or approximation thereof
Step 1: Start
Step 2: Declare the variables v1, v2, v3, v4, and sum
Step 3: Divide v1 by v2, add to v3 multiplied by v4, and assign the result to sum,
i.e. sum = (v1/v2) + (v3*v4)
Step 4: Display sum
Step 5: Stop
Figure 1. Formulas 2, 5, 10, 43, 51, and 68. Contributions from Seb Choe, Tyler Bohm, Rosary Solimanto, Nicholas Knight, Eleonor Botoman, and Amanda Turner Pohan.
Under the rubric of those formulas, goop, detritus, “live” elements, fragrances, and bodies collide with architecture, data, algorithms, and renderings to create ecosystems, collections of parts that imply an operative whole. The works that Gale, Kang, and Pohan proposed in response to these material relations help us reconceive of the relationships between the body, the self, and its containment. Their works might be viewed as fragmented bodies whose skin has been peeled away, or skins and scrims themselves, as much as bodies subjected to different functions of power. Gale, Kang, and Pohan pull this material and conceptual vocabulary apart to articulate a conception of the body, of flesh, as something adjacent to, possessed by, or absent from architectural, bureaucratic, and technological structures. It is a body that is neither inside nor outside.
Mira Dayal is an artist, critic, and curator based in New York. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Art Criticism, co-curator of the collaborative artist publication prompt:, and an assistant editor at Artforum. Her recent curatorial projects have included “Captions from and toward Correspondence” at SOHO20, Brooklyn; “rehearsal” at Crush Curatorial, Amagansett (co-curator); and “Consensus is an agreement between sense and sense” at 5-50 Gallery, Queens. Past exhibitions of her studio work include “Anagen” at Lubov, New York; “Object Intimacies” at NURTUREart, Brooklyn; “Material Metaphors” at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn; and “Volley” at Abrons Art Center, New York. She was recently in residence with Art in General in Brooklyn and previously in residence with A.I.R. Gallery on Governor’s Island. Her studio practice is concerned with language and materiality, structures and the body; she often works collaboratively.
Simon Wu is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the Program Coordinator for the Racial Imaginary Institute and a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. She holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned her MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Gale’s practice is often structured by long-term obsessions with specific objects, or classes of objects and the ways these objects gesture towards very specific social and political histories. She uses ubiquitous consumer technologies as frameworks to consider how individuals potentially reproduce their relationships to objects within their relationships to psychic space and political, social, and economic systems.
Laurie Kang is an artist living in Toronto. Kang has exhibited internationally at Interstate Projects and Topless, New York; The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Cooper Cole, 8-11, The Loon, Gallery TPW, and Franz Kaka, Toronto; L’inconnue, Montreal; Carl Louie, London; Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Wroclaw; Raster Gallery, Warsaw; Camera Austria, Graz; and Tag Team, Bergen. She was recently artist-in-residence at Rupert, Vilnius; Tag Team, Bergen; The Banff Centre, Alberta; and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.
Amanda Turner Pohan’s work examines the slippage between digital and physical embodiment, using the body’s complicated relationship to technology as source material. Installations featuring sculpture, scent, sound, video, and performance attempt to unpack the definition of gender as well as the definition of a body—what it is to be assigned or assumed, blurring the physical and conceptual limitations of each. If our electronic devices and online identities are extensions of the self, what do they nevertheless demand or inhibit, what do they make available to the senses, and what do they allow or deny the body?
The exhibition is accompanied by a 32-page color catalogue with texts by Mira Dayal and Simon Wu, Tausif Noor, and Andrianna Campbell. The catalogue is available online and free of charge to gallery visitors. For more information please contact Programs Associate Lilly Hern-Fondation at lilly@cueartfoundation.org.
This exhibition is the winning selection from the 2018-19 Open Call for Curatorial Projects. The proposal was unanimously selected by a jury comprised of artist Ali Banisadr, art historian Andrianna Campbell, and artist Steffani Jemison. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing the exhibition. We are honored to work with Andrianna Campbell as the Mentor of this exhibition.
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Catalogue essay: "Hear Away Closer: Notes on Sonic Sensibility" by Tausif Noor
PRESS
Thomas Micchelli, "Escaping the Neo-Conceptualist Bubble." Hyperallergic, May 4, 2019.
Etty Yaniv, “Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum at CUE Art Foundation.” Art Spiel, May 22, 2019.
