We are very pleased to offer an evening of gallery hours to coincide with Matt Morris’ nearby opening at Ruschman (4148 N Elston Ave), ‘violet sissy fleur pinkie.’ These two exhibitions were conceived and developed as companions and as a shared experience in the artful Irving Park neighborhood.

More information about our exhibition of Marin and Morris’ work below:

“You have been thrust into a history /
that has not worked for me /
into a history, from which I could not flee /
So, go on, shake me, shake until I give it up….”
–Sia. “Fair Game.” 1000 Forms of Fear, 2015.

“I am forever unfolding between two folds,
and if to perceive means to unfold,
then I am forever perceiving within the folds.”
–Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 1993.

“…a fag limbo in which all territorial claims, all hygienes separating music from philosophy from poetry, point toward a cross-media, intergenerational, autobiographical yet non-referential vacuum, a zone in which real art, finally, can begin to occur; I would be able to gesture toward this zone with a more able set of maps, were there time for laborious cartography in the crowded, rushed interstice of…the now at the expense of the then…”
–Wayne Koestenbaum. “Fag Limbo.” My 1980s & Other Essays, 2013.

The impulse toward collecting is imbued with indelible magic, quasi-quantum in its restless arrangement and rearrangement of material and conceptual touchstones into aggregates that orient toward as of yet unarticulated longings, desire, and excess. The survivalism of hunting and gathering as a precursor, the collated collected is an indicator of living through and as disparate fragments, queer assemblies, and unfixed, destabilized hierarchies—the humble tracking of a ribbon laced through overlapping cultural paradigms, popular taste, esoterica, memory, and the vestigial remainders of life navigated from one day to the next.

In a group of recent projects, André Marin and I have been searching for one or more matrices by which to process collected experience and material. André’s paper making and my satin ruching serve as capacities to hold—eccentric, irregular libraries in which to store a panoply of everyday miracles. The lacy, textured sheets André pulls from tubs of pulp that are akin to witchy vinegar mothers or sourdough starters function as systems of containment for mail order catalogs, receipts, handwritten notations, detritus from his various workplaces, and odd and end souvenirs. Likewise, this group of bâton works continues with a form latently referencing historical décor, specifically gathered fabric casings for the chains or cords from which chandeliers were hung, here printed with an inventory of images saved onto my phone—a forensics into my reflexes to screen capture, mood board, and twin with resemblances in my aesthetic dimensions.

Among the other lusty pursuits with which I entangle myself, I collect lovers: André is one of these. For five or so years, we’ve braided our lives into one another, swapping passions, sharing vulnerabilities, and, frankly, making use of one another as crucial parts of the apparatuses by which we’re respectively witnessed, understood, and explored. The works we’re showing here proceed from a latent conviction that life is synonymous with love and with longing. We wanted to show these things together as a way to probe some of our respective misgivings and skepticisms about the ways the art world often organizes around power, wealth, professional networking, and enforced taxonomies of identity. What happens if instead the making is predicated on romance and intimacy? If the exhibiting follows on friendships and other interpersonal bonds?

Our respective projects join up in order to question—if not divest from—linear time and stable spatial coordination, preferring instead conditions of collapse, introjection, and the wild, unmapped territories of one’s inner lives.

–Matt Morris, September 2024

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Tags: Andre Marin, André Marin and Matt Morris: Pink Days and Terroir Days, Irving park, Matt Morris, Pink Days and Terroir Days, Space & Time