In Stasis

In Stasis
Curated by Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour
September 7 – 30, 2012
Reception Friday, September 7, 7:00-10:00 pm

MacArthur B Arthur is pleased to present In Stasis, featuring work by Johanna Billing, Liam Everett, Roza Janiszewska, Bob Linder, Anna Sagström, and Joseph Thomas. Curated by Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour.

In Stasis is an exhibition that is at a stand off with itself. It is neither about a specific idea nor is it simply a collection of objects, though objects and ideas certainly play a part. The exhibition sits in an intermediary space, much like the people in Johanna Billing’s Project for a Revolution. In it, a young group of people sits waiting for the next thing to happen; there is a potential forestalled, whether this is out of incapacity or apathy is unclear. Likewise the works in the show will take up room in the gallery – waiting for the next step, for something to happen.

In biology a stasis is a period of no evolutionary change, in which a species has reached a state of punctuated equilibrium. Is the exhibition period is a length of time in which a group of objects and images are frozen in such a state – the auratic effect of the nomination artwork taking as its price change – or is presentation the beginning of an alternative state? Whether an artwork equates ambition fulfilled or is rather a barring of the future is difficult to ascertain.

Meanwhile, locked in the gallery, the artworks relax, spending most of their days in an unpeopled room amongst each other without a reading from a viewer or the familiar hand of their fabrication, the memory of which is fading.