Joy Curtis / Terence Hannum. Weight Over Time

About

There is a common language at play in the works of both Curtis and Hannum, where material fragmentation and decay perform as integral a subjective and aesthetic role as do the cultural and subcultural landscapes from which the artists draw inspiration. In an entropic system like our universe we are forced to make peace with the reality of time; the present continually cycling into the past, with the future always one step ahead. Because of this we have devised many different ways to mark the passage of time, and to act as a record of our interventions within the sphere of being.

By investigating traditional methods of dyeing fabric Joy Curtis has been exploring the role of past cultural traditions in order to examine the role of craft and belief in the present. By dyeing and cutting into fabric, Curtis allows the original object (a rectangle of canvas) to succumb to the weight of its history by utilizing gravity to pull the object into a new shape/form. What was once the same material a painter would use to stretch and prepare as a flat surface, Curtis is instead inviting an invisible force to draw her work into 3 dimensions. The ensuing objects reference human form through a resemblance to rib cages and various tribal masks/costumes maintaining a consistent narrative with past ideas and techniques, acting as relics or debris from our collective history.

As we devise new methods of intervention and new technologies with which to archive our activities we also leave behind a sea of obsolescence. By repurposing analog cassette tape into a visual rather than audio mark, Terence Hannum has been recycling audio cassettes and integrating the physical “line” of brown/black magnetic tape into dense and overlaid geometric patterns and fields of information. By integrating colored leader tape and allowing the magnetic dust to break free of the tape backing, Hannum reinvents the aesthetic ensemble as a wholly visual phenomenon. This reinterpretation of the album becomes a new and different means of cataloging or preserving the same information, while altering it such that it can no longer be accessed in its original form, leaving us with the idea or memory of the cassette and our relation to it.