The Ecology of Visibility

In a group show at Anonymous Gallery, alternatives to identity, space, and time arise through five artists' questions of representation and selfhood. Featuring work by Lutz Bacher, Frank Benson, Mary Manning, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), and Frances Stark, "The Ecology of Visibility" delves into the social prescriptions of the individual and their broader collective meaning. The artists' practices come together across media as far-ranging as photographic collage, human sculpture, video installation, and text to interrogate notions of the self.

Benson's Castaway (2018) [pictured], for instance, is a solitary human sculpture that exists on the verge of the virtual and the real. As the figure perches in a crouch, the statue's gaze asks the viewer to meet it at its level, offering a moment of relation and identification. Elsewhere in the gallery, a video focuses on Lutz Bacher's former gallerist's lower body as he answers her questions, the dissonance between audio and image adding to an atmosphere of palpable discomfort. Jade Kuriki Olivio's text installation boldly proclaims: "Woman With A Penis"— language that becomes both the content and the medium. The artists' simultaneous rejection and reclamation of prescribed modes of representation occur through channels of deliberation and disassociation, dwelling in discomfort and the possibility of connection.