Installation View of Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum

Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum Curatorial Walk-through
With curators Mira Dayal and Simon Wu
Tuesday, May 7, 2019
7pm - 8pm
FREE

Please join CUE for a public walkthrough of Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum with curators Mira Dayal and Simon Wu on Tuesday, May 7th at 7pm, during the final week of the exhibition. The curators will be available for questions after the walkthrough.

Formula 1 features work by Nikita Gale, Laurie Kang, and Amanda Turner Pohan. 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.

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. 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.

Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum is on view at CUE through May 8.

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?