Jason
Dodge, They lifted me into the sun again and packed my
skull with cinnamon
"They
lifted me into the sun again and packed my skull with
cinnamon" is an exhibition as an edition of six shown in six
venues simultaneously during the last week of October and the
first week of November. Participating venues include MOREpublishers
with Gevaert Editions (Brussels), Guimaraes (Vienna),
Akwa Ibom (Athens), Gern en Regalia (NYC), Gilles Drouault
galerie/multiples (Paris), and Galleria Franco Noero (Torino).
The
exhibition begins with the artist not being there, in all the
different ways that "not there" can mean. Absence becomes a
component of the show, which the title, borrowed from a poem
by Thomas James titled "Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh XXI
Dynasty," further highlights. The poem charts the ultimate
presence of absence, death, as a complex entanglement of the
corporeal and the spiritual. The narrator describes their own
mummification process, described impartially as an emptying
and filling method that treats the body as an aesthetic,
artistic object. While within the poem's bounds, the spirit
remains mostly autonomous, Dodge's exhibition negotiates a
spiritual, also authorial presence that actively involves
others in its corporeal becoming. A set of specific items: 20
Bayer Aspirin advertisements, a missing animal flyer, loose
Marigold petals, batteries, forks, and fabric, and a found
shopping list, is sent to each space to be installed following
instructions sent electronically by the artist. Within this
set of instructions is the; conversational, improvisational,
and accumulative, employment of different practices, other
bodies, and touches, the exhibition's own poetics is animated
through a series of choices akin to the translator's
entanglement in a poem. In each incarnation of this exhibition
Dodge has asked someone to perform the installation as a
surrogate, here in Brussels the installation will be performed
by Tom Engels.
The
dancer and choreographer Alix Eynaudi has composed a score to
follow in order to install all of the exhibitions. The score
addresses the buying of the items listed in the shopping list
and to unpack them in the room; things understood firstly as
products to be consumed inside the body, applied outside the
body, and to clean what the body uses. Unrelated to
randomness, but open to interpretation, this show builds on
Dodge's previous habit of inviting friends and colleagues to
lend titles and texts to his exhibitions, but here inspires a
freer movement in a conversation with things, an improvisation
using a shared score that is not concluded by a single
iteration.
On
view
20.10.2020 - 15.11.2020
Rue
du Chapeau, 10
B-1070
Brussels
By
appointment only
Call:
+32 (0)489 98 58 87 (Tim Ryckaert) / +32 (0)471 67 90 34
(Saskia Gevaert)
Mail:
info@morepublishers.be / saskia.gevaert@gmail.com
[20
October 2020]
