Sam Lewitt (* 1981, lives in New York) presents under the title International Corrosion Fatigue a new installation. It is the third solo exhibition of the artist at Galerie Buchholz.
For Michel Foucault, the letterset world was increasingly a space of recording and regulation [...] If language emerged from us, with letterset writing, it slowly began to turn back on us, creating classifications and files, systems of ordering and numbering. Even as electronic technology has replaced mechanical systems in the last hundred or so years, these bureaucratic inventions have remained. In fact, they have intensified, creating an ever-proliferating number of barriers and codes that never even really need to print themselves out. Since the early 2000s Lewitt has made it his project to tease out connections between technologies of writing and the subjects that inhabit them. -Alex Kitnick, Fully Automatic Writing
Record–The electrical signals that course through my camera when the shutter button is pressed move along ultrathin flat flexible cables etched in copper bonded to a plastic substrate. These conduits coordinate and control the imaging system. Before any shots are framed, the camera manufacturer's website promises 'uncompromised ... power and flexibility right in the palm of your hand'. 'Flexibility' stands for both end-user performance and the technical structure of the device. It is a term that mediates physical and ideological descriptions prior to the record of any image whatever.
Erase – In Spring 2012 a team of security and police confiscated and erased a batch of photographs from my camera after I had taken a walk around a central High Frequency Trading hub in New Jersey. My ageing prosumer SLR is a model called the Canon Rebel t1i. I was told by the police that if I was really an artist, I should be able make drawings from memory. Contrary to the promises of the camera's brand identity, it was assumed that I should have the discipline to do such a thing.
Print – The head of security gave me his card after ordering that the images be erased. The graphic of a flexing helix on the card is thus material for me too. It suggests that the flex of control stretches right through the remote location, its corporate structure, the security that guards it, the camera that takes its picture, and the artist that is framed by his shots. Here's where personal pronouns get stripped.
Strip (corrode) – Lineaments are etchings made by bathing ribbons of copper clad plastic used in flexible circuit manufacturing in ferric chloride. This chemical corrodes the copper in areas where an oil based resist has not first secured the copper underneath. The corrosion of all unsecured material thickens slick graphics into irritated plastics.
Strip (degrease) – After etching, a fine spray of solvent degreases the areas secured against corrosion. A sheet of blotter paper pulls up the resist in affected areas. This process results in stripes scaled to an interior, leaving room for future flexing. No feature here is site specific. The works are 'Weak Local Lineaments' for 'International Corrosion Fatigue.'
Stripe (degauss) – Electro-magnetic media circulate information to an automated reader. Stored Value Field Separators are self-cancelling communications. They are columns made from magnets pulled from hard drives, punctuated by cards with magnetic stripes whose data lines are erased by adjacent forces.
The artist book Fluid Employment by Sam Lewitt has just been published by Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York and Koenig Books, London.
Press release courtesy Galerie Buchholz. Text: Sam Lewitt, 2013.
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