This is a show about unlearning certain ways of doing certain things. The title is both literal and wordplay: Reeves presents objects and materials that have their typical uses subverted or discreet uses revealed to mine our various conditions of social standardization; Sudbrink recontextualizes the gestures from aerobics and exercise ephemera away from their biopolitical address into great conceptual possibilities. Working together in this exhibition, Reeves and Sudbrink use recordings, photographs, performances, found expanded scores, writings, musical instruments, and archival documents to propose and illustrate ways of making that play with and against habits and presupposed notions of ecstatic creativity. In this participatory and collaborative exhibition, Reeves and Sudbrink propose possibilities to recenter the production of knowledge, to deskill and reskill in order to creatively imagine and encourage new skills. “Unlearning Exercises” isn’t against reproducing practical knowledge, but gently contests standardized notions of what constitutes it, in the arts or otherwise. Things are not one way, we are not one thing, so why should knowledge (and the search for new knowledges, e.g. art) be reproduced as immutable?

ALSO WITH: a takeaway 45rpm of Chris Reeves, “How to Listen to a Record” featuring Yuniya Edi Kwon, Sampada Aranke, Josh Rios (edition of 75); a takeaway newspaper catalogue of the show; a takeaway postcard of choreography culled from aerobics records by Lauren Sudbrink; visual proposals for fantastic fluting by Alden Burke with Kayla Anderson; Alex Bradley Cohen with Tamara Becerra Valdez; Kitty Rauth with Matt Morris; Marco Guagnelli with Deanna Ledezma; questions like: how might a guitar be like a tennis racket? How are fake flowers like a microphone? What might a syllabus of effects look like? What were all those Jane Fonda records about, anyway?

AND OPENING NIGHT: performances of the Talking Heads “(Nothing But) Flowers” by Madeleine Aguilar and Mauricio Lopez F.

Movement performances by Lauren Sudbrink and Camille Casemier

More events forthcoming throughout the month!

Chris Reeves (PhD 2021) is a creative researcher, lecturer, art historian, curator, and writer. He is the co-editor and author of the book The World’s Worst: A Guide to the Portsmouth Sinfonia (Soberscove Press) and his writings and works have been seen in various publications, gallery spaces, and objects throughout the United States and Europe.

Lauren Sudbrink (MFA 2015) is an artist, composer and performer whose work is concerned with the possibilities of social engagement. Her intermedial work considers the possibilities of the participatory function of art within an ever-shifting constellation of systems and processes. Since 2016, she has been working on her 840 Variations on Vexations, an ode to the 840 repetitions necessary to complete Erik Satie’s short piano piece, Vexations.