Izidora I LETHE
ABSENT SKIN
March 23 - April 15, 2023
620 Kearny St.

Opening March 23, 5-8pm
Live stream of a listening session / DJ with Aio Frei 5:30pm at twitch.tv/et_al_etc

In ABSENT SKIN, the works (3, 7, 21, 147, 3087) aim at vitalizing some of the enclosures of seemingly uninvolved structures (form, surface, display, location, country).
The transdisciplinary works in the exhibition consist of traditional art forms such as drawing, sculpture, print and performance - which gladly slip away from their function as works of “visual art” in their prioritization to meet the gaze. Each work-groupings’ conceptual performativity is brought to the fore as it functions as formal work and at the same time as intervention. By making porosity, perforation, and breath central parameters of ABSENT SKIN, the works occur on the surface and expose material and metaphoric limit(ation)s as extendable.

Various absences are operating in the exhibition, while the act of having to be seen in order to be granted existence is questioned: The performance occurs in the absence of an audience. The 3 performers’ exhale parameters the rhythm of how the pigment is applied onto the walls: a simple choreography of leaving a wall-glow. The specificity of the performer‘s own embodied polylingual and transcultural knowledge is central information in what all is constituting the glow left behind.

As pigment is applied onto the walls on either side of the exhibition space, the center wall is expanded: holes drilled by gallery workers extend that architectural structure, and 21 green paper-tubes intervene into it, as if to let it breathe. Later, when the wall gets spackled for exhibitions to come, the work stays in the wall and the wall remains porous.

7 drawings mounted in plexiglass hint at lexical or indexical forms surrounded by rippled perforations. Rather than making a sign legible, the ‘perforation drawings’ become a concerto of punctuations beyond the clear signifier and its enclosed image.
The viewers’ generally passive relation to the wall and their own bodies in the act of looking is here asked to bend, move over, find the light, look through the display in order to find the work. An engraved text on the left side of each plexiglass display misspells the machine-readable code used internationally in identification cards. State-determined document categories – such as “gender“, “place of birth“, “alien number“, “expiration date“ etc. – which usually enforce the legibility of an individual’s identity, are abandoned.

The work is created and installed in the physical absence of the artist. No flying about the planet has been undertaken, no borders crossed. The work is created under continuous communication with each collaborator involved, stringing together a sensual closeness despite distance – the common experience of temporary reconnection between absence kin.

3087 seconds of a listening-session will be live-streamed on the day of the opening, bridging places that can not touch, while making possible to attune to a listening experience created by and in absence of DJ in resonance with the exhibition’s core concepts.

ABSENT SKIN is a situation offering a temporary relief from full attesting in order to exist.
ABSENT SKIN is an invitation to exhale.

Performers                     – Marcel Pardo Ariza, P Leal, Beatriz Escobar

Listening Session / DJ      – Aio Frei

Risograph printed by       – Colpa Press, San Francisco

Text Editor                     – Tash Matteson