EXHIBITION PRESS RELEASE:
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FACTORY SHOWROOM: FIXING THE FUTURE - TECHNICS AND TIME
THE JACOB LAWRENCE GALLERY

The Jacob Lawrence Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Fixing the Future – Technics and Time, includes works concerned with temporality, methodology, and facticity, including a special installation by Dutch artist Erik van Lieshout, Commission, 2011; a video by Euan Macdonald, House (everythinghappensatonce), 1999; and a special screening of Supposing I Love You. And You Also Love Me, created for the 2011 Venice Biennale by the recent Heineken Prize-winning Dutch artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh.


WENDELIEN VAN OLDENBORGH (Dutch, b. 1962)
Supposing I Love You. And You Also Love Me, 2011


FRANCESCA LOHMANN (American, b. 1986)
Splat, 2014
Folded inkjet print on newsprint

Untitled Lumps, 2014; Coils, 2015; Cast plaster Line Work, 2015

Between birth and death, existence is what extends itself [Er-streckung] between “already” and “not yet.” This ecstasis is constituted through the horizon of death in that Dasein, in any act of self-anticipation, is always already anticipating its own death (its own end). Any activity on Dasein’s part is always essentially ordered by anticipation of the end that is “the most extreme possibility” and that constitutes the originary temporality of existence. This possibility of anticipation is, nevertheless, twofold. On the one hand, Dasein can in its activity always not “possibilize” the being-toward-the-end that forms its very essence, refusing thereby to open itself to its future insofar as it is its own, a future that is as radically indeterminate as the “when,” “why,” and “how” of its end [...] On the other hand, Dasein can live its own possibilities as its incommensurable “ipseity,” refusing to retreat before the essential solitude in which the anticipation of its own end ultimately always leaves it. –Bernard Stiegler, “Technics and Time, I”.


PHILLIP CARPENTER (American, b. 1977)
Timepiece (a Six-month Carving of a Thirty-Six Year Old Tree), 2014
Carved wood

Every natural being . . . has within itself a beginning of movement and rest, whether the “movement” is a locomotion, growth or decline, or a qualitative change . . . [whereas] not one product of art has the source of its own production within itself. –Aristotle


ERIK VAN LIESHOUT (Dutch, b. 1968)
Commission, 2010
Single-channel video with audio, vinyl, carpet

Built in 1968, the Zuidplein Mall was one of the first in the Netherlands and represented a utopian vision regarding future wealth and urban harmony. Over the decades the Rotterdam South neighbourhood sunk into severe poverty. The Zuidplein mall became a hangout for the poor and the unemployed. And thus became a place that was best avoided. In summer 2010, van Lieshout opened a temporary shop in an abandoned unit in the mall. Rather than simply selling goods, he used his shop as a base from which to (re) connect with the neighborhood and its people, engaging them in characteristically frank and often very funny conversations about roots, regeneration, security and consumerism. Commission is van Lieshout’s commentary on the socio-political powerlessness of people and of art. It is also a quest for a home [...] the film is both a portrait of a place, and of an artist’s half-skeptical, half-hopeful attempt to become an agent of social good. –Museum für Moderne Kunst


EUAN MACDONALD (Scottish, b. 1965)
House (everythinghappensatonce), 1999
Single-channel digital video with audio (from Hi8 original) 19:54 minutes

..the movement of the house so slow it cannot be seen, the boat so fast it can hardly be noticed, or its passengers so quick that they can barely see the house in turn. “We call simultaneous then, two external fluxes that occupy the same duration because they hold each other in the duration of a third, our own ... [It is this] simultaneity of fluxes that brings us back to internal duration, to real duration.” [Deleuze] The experience of duration as a virtual continuous multiplicity opens up the dimension of thinking and the engagement of memory, which is that of the spiritual within a secular frame.

...slowness is still too fast –Barbara Fischer, “Speed Still or Still Speed”.