Cul-de-sac

About

The group exhibition, Cul-de-sac, marks the beginning of the end for the Cathouse FUNeral / Proper gallery project in its current form. Cul-de-sac is the first in a series of shows scheduled for the 2022-2023 season that will celebrate our ten years of art activity––and six years at 524 Projects––by meditating on cultural memory and its relationship to the art object as we bring the current gallery program to a close in June 2023.

The shape and purpose of a “cul-de-sac” (translated literally from the French as “bottom of the sack” and defined as a street with no exit, yet terminating in a circular space for reversal) begins this season-long meditation by drawing a correlation between our physical gallery space, which is in the shape of a cul-de-sac, and the act of ending. Hence, the designation “cul-de-sac” is brought to bear both on the gallery as space and the gallery program as duration.

Like the Cathouse FUNeral / Proper gallery project itself, which has been a years-long series of interrelated exhibitions, the group exhibition, Cul-de-sac, will unfold sequentially over time, with new artwork added each week, revisiting several of the artists that we have worked with in the past, as well as a few artists new to the program. The initial moves for this exhibition have been worked out, but the endgame is not yet known, nor are all of the artists’ works that will be installed and/or performed before closing the exhibition on December 11. (Please follow us on instagram @cathouse_proper for the most complete accounting of ongoing installation and scheduling updates.)

To begin the show, on opening day, we will install in the center of the empty main gallery Michael Ashkin’s sculpture No. 43 (1996), which employs another sort of street metaphor, a parking lot, depicted in miniature and bifurcated by a train track with a single, stranded parked car. Each week, thereafter, another work or series of works will be installed, each with its own time signature and/or relevance as to the comings and goings of art activity, its manifest subjects and objects, its relics and wreckage, its absolutes and eternal returns. 

Ultimately, with Cul-de-sac, like a painting evolving toward completion, we will only know what it is––the totality of its constituent parts, its final judgement, so to speak––when it is over. The closing then is the opening for what has been and now is; while asserting, one suspects, that a cul-de-sac is no dead-end.