like flex / like flex
Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Em Rooney
September 3 - 26, 2010
Like an inversion of the body, a palindrome, or a triangle, the tension an object holds comes from its positioning – its adjacency to like-forms or anti-forms. The gesture of the flex is contingent upon an articulation of a multitude of parts, working in a single motion to appear poised, tense, controlled, open.
A twist of the kaleidoscope; two hands wringing out a wet washcloth.
As basic as our body's fundamental movements, like flex / like flex's formal, post-minimal investigation of queer and post-identity visuality asserts no hierarchy between a minimal object and an object imbued with content. The dialogue between the two classes of objects illuminates the phenomenological and physical possibilities that lie within these conflicted formal tropes.
The terse harmony of the exhibition rests in the controlled scatter of sculptural material, unbound by a discourse that seeks recognition from distinctions of gender and sexuality. This queered formalism is thus born from the confluence of techniques that confront the ways in which they themselves have been romanticized, mythicized or normalized.
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