CONSENSUS IS AN AGREEMENT BETWEEN SENSE AND SENSE

Curated by Mira Dayal
Lizzy De Vita and Hong Seon Jang
On view: August 31st–September 30th, 2018
Opening reception: September 7th, 7–10pm

Waves of blue-black ink across water, chorus of voices praising their nations, emergency heat of silver film, sliver of light from a space beyond. Lizzy De Vita and Hong Seon Jang are attuned to the frequencies of violence and power, steady pulses and numbing crescendos. Their works are not salves but wounds and transmutations. Jang’s June 14, installed in a liminal space between gallery and street, introduces the techniques employed throughout the show. Beginning with a quotidian but undoubtedly political artifact—all the news that’s fit to print—Jang uses a single gesture to simultaneously exaggerate and annul the utility of the newspaper: Juxtaposing the events of June 14, 1972 with those of the same date this year, he invites comparisons between two sets of conditions, both of which were once framed as urgent and emergent.

Emergent. Emergency. What do we know? What do we need? Maslow’s hierarchy asks for food, water, sleep, and heat as the base conditions for the health of a human being. De Vita’s Billow is a monument to one of these needs, heat, itself generated in the gallery via a fragile and urgent physical form—the emergency heat blanket, first designed by NASA for application in outer space as a form of protection and now used by refugees, those subjected to the earthly condition of alienation. Its function depends on the redirection of infrared waves, something we cannot see but feel as a form of insulation. Knotted and hung as a partition, the membrane is semi-transparent, permitting a gaze from outside in but obscuring the exterior from within its golden influence. Nearby,Suppuration and The Lake continue the illusions of (allusions to) illumination, separation. 

Permanently Marked echoes the rhythm and premise of Billow. The layered surface is composed of historical maps printed in the 1960s through 1990s, partially obscured by a laborious application of ink, a curtain that reveals the precarity and impermanence of cartography, history. Nearby, Instrument might be, by title, a useful tool for mapping or measuring or militarizing but is in fact only a tool for music. From within the repurposed organ pipe emanates an aural assemblage—harmonies turned dissonant—of nationalisms, competing but structurally parallel anthems. 

These compound objects toy with material and conceptual expectations, constituting sensory confusions and architectural incisions. They negotiate perception and meaning, sense and sense.

Lizzy De Vita is an artist, writer, and discussion curator who lives and works in Brooklyn. De Vita's work occupies a constellation of media, including performance, text, sound, drawing, installation, video and sculpture. Diverse in form, the work is unified by an underlying interest in viral moments: places where the boundaries between ourselves and others are blurred. De Vita earned her BA in Art History and English Literature from Barnard College and her MFA in Sculpture and Extended media at Yale. 

Hong Seon Jang received his MFA at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY. His awards include: Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Percent for Art Commission, The Jamaica Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, Tokyo Arts and Space, AHL foundation, Newark Museum, and Bemis Art Center. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at TSA, New York; MeetFactory, Prague, Czech Republic; Wellin Museum of Art; The Jamaica Center for Arts; McColl Center; Smack Mellon; the Cohen Gallery at Brown University; The Soap Factory; The Islip Art Museum; Artspace; and Rush Arts Gallery, among others.

Mira Dayal is an artist, critic, and curator based in New York. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Art Criticism, co-curator of the collaborative artist publication prompt:, and an assistant editor at Artforum. Her recent curatorial projects have been presented at Helena Anrather, A.I.R. Gallery, the Pfizer Building, and Barnard College; her publications are collected by MoMA Library, Barnard College Library, and SVA Library. During 2018–19, she is a Curatorial Fellow at CUE Art Foundation and at SOHO20.

Exhibition title excised from Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2010).