OPENING FRIDAY, MAY 26TH, FROM 6PM

In the off hours 
Curation : Taddeo Reinhardt

Steve Bishop 

Cudelice Brazelton IV 

Lynne Cohen  

Eli Durst 

"Contingency is larger than knowldege [and] often what pleases in vision is contingency held  within a frame or screen. I use the word ornament in this way."

Lisa Robertson, Nilling, 2012 

A space is a vertigo.  

It is the sum of factors, traces, passages, affects and suspects. It is the manifestation as well as  the memory of the contingency of their meeting and arrangement. 

It contains much more than it seems and knows much more than it claims. It tends to keep  silent about what has passed through it, what it has seen, endured or heard, but betrays in the  off hours the evidence of an activity or activation, the nature and conduct of which are tightly  bound up in an a priori. 

From the 1970s to the 2010s, Lynne Cohen worked on the systematic and formal  documentation of spaces temporarily devoid of human presence. Beyond the rigour and  coldness that might be attributed to her work at first glance, unfolds what could be described  as an archive of 'equilibria', of inanimate situations that reveal the singular, often absurd,  political and sensitive nature of everyday decors. More than an observation of absence, her  photographs address a place's incarnation and the influence of the things that make it up. 

In 'In the off hours', a series of heterogeneous situations are placed in dialogue in an (almost)  silent cacophony, while only the notes of a few jazz pieces escape in the murmur of a small  radio placed on what looks like a bedside table. Setting an artificial and ambiguous balance, a  series of universes are confronted: the intimacy of a room, the hostility of a factory, the  strangeness of a community centre, all caught in states of suspension. The artists in the  exhibition use the traces and imprints that make up these common landscapes to invoke  different regimes of experience and perception. 

Steve Bishop's work induces vertigo, playing on effects of scale. 'The Human Situation' is held  on a page in capital letters; a bowl of cereal stands on top of the 'Present Time'. These objects  end up crystallizing two parallel memories: that of a long, geological time, and that of a fleeting,  personal memory. The association of the objects that make up Embraceable You refers as much  to a series of simple gestures as to the immense field of factors that led to their embodiment.

In contrast, Cudelice Brazelton IV's two canvases echo a series of mechanical gestures, caught  in constraint and repetition. The phrase "Non-Conforming Material", found on a sign in a steel  factory, functions as a metonymy. The treatment of the works, sanded and worn out, refers to  

the impact of industrial spaces on the bodies that activate them. In a layering and  fragmentation process, agents are exposed that carry with them the challenges of complex  social and political systems: textiles, cosmetics, manufactured products. 

Eli Durst's photographs document scenes of a particularly curious and strange nature. Taken  from the series The Community, an exploration of various community spaces across the United  States, these images are, in the artist's words, "about the search for purpose and meaning in a  world that both demands and resists interpretation." The incongruity of the situations he  captures leaves one perplexed or smiling, and materializes the capacity of social groups to  organize themselves around what is beyond the tangible: forms of belief and spirituality.  

The exhibition traces a loose network of markers that carry the complex backbone of a given  time. Simply connected to the present through a few melodies, the works install a paralysis that  invites observation and introspection. They challenge our capacity for interpretation and subtly  put into perspective, through the representation of concrete or immaterial manifestations, our  relationship to the space and time we inhabit 

In the off hours, the world reveals itself in negative, causing a daze, and ends up eluding our  gaze and our perception. That which is "larger than knowledge" stands unnoticed. Here  perhaps lies melancholy, or pain, or boredom; there a potentiality or the unthinkable, a time  past or one to come.