The dust exceeded all expectations
September 2024
Exhibition
Compére Collective - Red Hook, Brooklyn
The dust exceeded all expectations
September 6-20th, 2024
351 Van Brunt St, Brooklyn, NY
Lia Di Bitonto, Cecilia Chiappini, Joseph Issac Cohen, India Halsted, Jamison Lung, Iz Nettere, Leslie Rosario-Olivo, Caleb Stone, Sage Vousé, and Claire Beini Zhang
A year ago we began to meet as a group. What started as 18, settled to 6 and grew to 10. We gather biweekly as generous askers and lookers to share a meal and then to critique our work. Expanding and contracting like a spring, our shape de- and re- forms in seasons. We move slowly through a form of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, modified and augmented each week by a self-elected leader. A curious ritual begins: We say “I notice frames” or “I see fronts but no backs” and shift from formal observation to questioning to opinion, brushing bits of debris from our minds. There is no need to separate warp from weft, only to shake out our blanket and watch the dust - momentarily illuminated in the air.
It is through relation that our work gains potency. Learning from one another, we unspool like a ball of string held between two fingers. We roll across the floor gathering bits of debris, playing copycat or antagonist as means to question our supposed signatures. We emerge again and again, now bringing you into our process of becoming.
As we shift from critical responders to exhibition makers, we work in pairs to draw out the bonds between our practices. In our installation process, we propose an ambiguous continuity, a space where our edges dissolve. Laid forth are the seeds of our exchange.
Over time, we move in cycles, revisiting ourselves but from a distance. We are rooted in asking “why” and in doing so we find the patterns that emerge in change. We encourage moments to let our work rest and others to invigorate it. We interrogate the politics of our plasters, our paints, our metals and find that it is in critique where we come into contact with ourselves, where dust compacts into flight. The studio is a lint roller’s paradise, where dust generates more dust.
Text by Cecilia Chiappini, Caleb Stone, and Joseph Cohen