Picture The Cricket’s Legs Apart: Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago, IL, 60607
“At the moment everything was being destroyed she had created that which is most difficult: she had not drawn something out of nothing (a meaningless act), but given to nothing, in its form of nothing, the form of something. The act of not seeing now had an integral eye. The silence, the real silence, the one which is not composed of silenced words, of possible thoughts, had a voice.”
– Maurice Blanchot (from Thomas the Obscure)
Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to present Picture the Cricket’s Legs Apart, an exhibition featuring works by Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Aaron Garber-Maikovska, Justin Hansch, Natalie Häusler, Julian Hoeber, Dawn Kasper, Alexi Kukuljevic and Analia Saban.
It is a common misinformation that a field cricket produces the chirping sound that acts as a mating call by rubbing its legs together when in fact it rubs the back of one of its wings across the other to produce this sound. It makes little difference to most of us how this sound is produced but the falsehood of this explanation establishes the image of the cricket’s leg as a confused emblem for a noise it doesn’t author. You could say that it’s a ruin of a metaphor and also that this collapse into ruin has exhausted our tolerance so that no other part of a cricket’s body might ever again be nominated as a metaphor for sound. This isolated and detached, static, hairy leg once perceived as the amorous lyre of an Orphean Orthoptera lies there in the wastebasket of abandoned similes, producing nothing but an imminent silence. It could be jewelry. A corporeal fragment stripped of all its content may share the morbidly erotic stillness of a marble sculpture.
Besides a tendency to milk alien grammar from oft dismissed quotidian subjects (sink tops, corporate car lot landscaping details, the observation that a bald human head is shaped like a celestial body) the works in this show appear neither to deny the void that metaphors try to bridge, nor do they over identify with an engineer’s desire to cross it. Perhaps more than pulling content out of stone they are calmly pouring their own intentions into wet cement.
The carpenter’s vernacular 8-bit (in reference to a router) might easily slip into the euphemism for primitive video game graphics, the displaced decorative molding of the room as the seam of an architectural screen freeze. An eccentric analysis or aesthetic deviation may become the foundational interrogation that frames the glitch in plastered dovetail, or as a text in repose as a prism.
During the opening reception Dawn Kasper will give a performance and the poem inscribed into Natalie Häusler’s translucent cylindrical scroll This It will be performed by Marc LeBlanc.
