Slippage

About

Conceived during a time of particular uncertainty, Slippage examines different ways in which artists articulate liminal space: personal, geographical, material, and temporal. If liminal refers to the physical or psychological state of being “in-between,” then the pandemic’s effects have created a perfect storm of uncomfortable collective liminality. The fundamental organization of everyday life was ripped away and what had previously felt predictable became unstable, resulting in a shared but often isolating state of limbo.

This lingering limbo is a unique vantage point from which to view artwork–as artwork itself emerges from the uncharted expanse between what is and what could be. The works in this exhibition, disparate in subject matter and execution, place the viewer in moments of what is sometimes known as slippage: the revelation of a juncture where disparate elements meet. This moment can be a physical space, a fugitive experience, or a literal threshold. For instance, Marina Abramović and Ulay’s Imponderabilia (shown as a film of the original performance) asks the viewer to make an emotionally loaded, split-second decision about how and if they will pass through a doorway flanked by a naked man and woman with mere inches between their bodies. In Marcelo Moscheta’s video Pau Brasil, a hand gradually removes bark spines from the trunk of the Pau Brasil tree, a vital natural resource exploited to exhaustion and a symbol of Brazilian national identity. The video articulates a state of ecological, psychological and economic vulnerability, or what the artist calls “an eternal dispute between maintaining the roots that make us a nation or surrendering to dominant influences, global and foreign, that slowly remove what [is] most valuable...”

Borrowing from the fields of literature, psychology, and architecture as well as visual art, Slippage invites viewers to experience the uncomfortable junctures of human experience, veering from the personal and intimate to the existential and global.