SEMI AUTONOMOUS BODIES

September 6 – October 6, 2019 — PS122 Gallery (New York, NY)

A group exhibition curated by Ian Cofré and featuring small works by Lydia Dona, Ron Gorchov, Spencer Hinson, Olga Sophie Kauppinen, and Tom McGrath.

SEMI AUTONOMOUS BODIES assembles the work of five artists who are both bound and unbound by the experiences that brought them together in art and education at different times over the last three decades. Spencer Hinson was a student and project assistant of Tom McGrath, who was a student of Lydia Dona, who was a student of Ron Gorchov, whose long-time studio assistant is Olga Sophie Kauppinen. Rejecting the idea of the master-student dynamic, its Oedipal or kill-your-idols upending, the atelier model, “From the school of...,” “In the style of…,” this exhibition focuses on a network of critical feedback and dialogue to build a closed circuit with examples of each artist's most recent production.

Does influence matter? If so, how do we measure it? A fruitful educational exchange is never unilateral, so is there a reverse influence that infects both practices? Do the teachings of one generation affect another generation's students directly or indirectly? What information has been transmitted? Even the strictest historical investigation would be frustrated in an attempt to answer these questions by the geographic and temporal separations, mistakes in memory, and incomplete stories.

This show considered a number of approaches—aesthetic, intellectual, philosophical—, instead, it turns to a selection of these specific objects in order to build a genealogy. Or more precisely, it takes the uncharacteristically small examples before us in order to discern some biological lineage. Although the expressions vary wildly amongst themselves, we ask if there is such a thing as an Art Gene, and if so, what is its imprint? Gestural, lyrical, material, conceptual…is there shared DNA represented here?

We acknowledge that to a certain degree these artists were self-selecting in the earlier bonds they created, and again through the present curatorial vector, so the pursuit could be redefined as a search to identify a Recombinant DNA, i.e. “formed artificially by combining constituents from different organisms.” Will this r-DNA help us identify an as-yet undiscovered, ongoing, latent process? Does it speak to any one of these artist's legacies, or all of them? Will it be transformed again by this encounter? And lastly, can it produce its own new semi autonomous bodies?