GROUP EXHIBITION

The exhibition brings together works by Louise Bourgeois, Heidi Bucher, Sam Chermayeff, John Hejduk, Camille Henrot, James Hong, Ficus Interfaith, Anne Libby, Mathieu Matégot, Emma McCormick Goodhart, Pietro Melandri, Luke O’Halloran, Eli Ping, Steph Shiu, Sophie Stone, Kim Tschang-Yeul, Luc Tuymans, and Yooyun Yang.

The title House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate is an homage to a project of the same name by the architect John Hejduk, a masterpiece of what he called ‘the architecture of pessimism.’ The house is part of a trilogy of structures illustrating his proposition that humanity is trapped in the compressed, flattened realm of the moment—a counter to the early Modernists’ optimistic obsession with dynamism and the future. The pieces presented in the show partake in this exploration of the spatial quality of a singular instant.

Long shadows, rendered in two tones of felt, stretch unchanging across the floor of the room. John Hejduk’s ‘Cilia’ bed, at once containing ‘a dread and a sensuousness,’ the solidification of an improper thought, draped in a beaded work by Steph Shui on which visitors are invited to recline; Eli Ping’s folded canvas ‘Monocarp’, suspended in a resin coating, flash frozen; Luke O’Halloran’s radiating playing cards, caught in mid air; Mathieu Matégot’s 1960 woozy Tijuana sunset never fully setting; Camille Henrot’s gloves, slipped from an anonymous pocket, fixed in bronze; James Hong’s 1981 Tropic of Cancer table, the static remnants of a tidal shift; Anne Libby’s rippling reflection of one building on another, as if seen from the LA freeway...

It’s here that you are confronted with the flattest condition. It’s also the quickest condition, the fastest timewise in the sense that it’s the most extended, the most heightened; at the same time, it’s the most neutral, the most at repose. In other words, it’s a point of slip-over, a place that you can’t anticipate or delay. – Hejduk/Wall.

Staged specially for the exhibition’s opening reception, AMOC artists Anthony Roth Costanzo, countertenor, and Coleman Itzkoff, cellist, will perform ‘Ombra Mai Fu’ by George Frideric Handel (from 1738) and ‘In Darkness Let Me Rest’ by John Dowland (from 1610).

Text by Chelsey Mitchell and Adam Charlap Hyman. Press release courtesy Tina Kim Gallery.