Read No Read: a Group Exhibition Curated by Lisa Williamson

Sid M. Duenas, ACCUMULATION STACK—C.B.O.P. (detail), 2022, Ink-transfer on paperboard, charcoal, plywood, glass, brass-plated artist frame

Read No Read, Sarah Conaway, Sid M. Duenas, Merideth Hillbrand, Nicole Miller, Ragen Moss, Chadwick Rantanen, Rosha Yaghmai at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles

By D.K. Sole

Read No Read offers to show us nothing less than one of the functions of art itself. “[O]ne reason that art remains such an infinite and compelling read,” says the press release, is the “negotiation between visibility and concealment, between what is legible and what is left intentionally obtuse.” On paper that sounds like fairly familiar art-writing territory, a sweeping handwave that might let the curator plonk almost anything in, but Lisa Williamson has considered her premise seriously, with clarity, and the exhibition is a series of beautiful examples that illustrate her point.  

Looking around, I had the impression that she had started by asking herself some basic questions, like, what does legibility mean? What is supposed to be legible? What do we expect to be able to “read”? Text is the most obvious answer, and the show has several examples of subverted texts that either work at teaching you how to read them (Nicole Miller) or confront you with a format that ends by making you illiterate (Sid M. Duenas*). The words in Duenas’ “Accumulation Stack – C.B.O.P.” are dissected and reassembled so that they stammer, as do the laser projection in Miller’s “A Signal”. “Signal” writes the same word over and over again but differently each time, making me focus on individual letters by having them flash and jerk as it places them on the wall. The method of creation, rather than the content, becomes the point of divergence between one word and the next. Writing is not annihilated but it is changed.** Meanwhile, the words stuck to the shining fiberglass shoulders of Regan Moss’ ambiguous kidney-torso forms in the next room are pre-broken; they are cartoonish onomatopoeia that hovers aggressively between text and sound. Kapow! The stammering titles (“Hero Babe, bah-ba! bang bang!”) suggest that, like the forms themselves, they are half-things striving for outlines. “Kapow” is a word that wants to be shouted out loud, but how is a Hero Babe going to do that with no head, no mouth? The artist teases their aspirations by giving them scraps of starry superhero capes.  

What else should I be able to read? Common cultural symbols? Chadwick Rantanen’s “Crux Simplex” pieces, erect arrangements of mute wooden blocks, are hung so that they lean out over my head like sublimated crucifixes with stunted crosspieces. This part of Read No Read makes a good companion piece to Rantanen’s exhibition a few months ago at Bel Ami, where mini untraversable staircases hung below found photographs from which crosses had been digitally removed in the same way: the crosspieces had vanished. Rantanen’s recent work on its own is an example of the “negotiation” that the press release talks about. Erasing crosspieces to bury crosses sounds so simple that it should be a joke, but when it’s introduced to a gallery where there is a special weight on the phenomenon of things being visually shown then it becomes deliberate and evasive and it affects the whole space. Is it critiquing the notion that Christianity is a coherent system? Is it calling the gallery a secular enforcer that compels crosses to go into hiding? What is this? The response might be simply that word: it’s a negotiation. But that leads to another question: a negotiation between what and what?  

Rosha Yaghmai’s giant floor eyeball is another negotiation, a middle point, a double iris pointing in two directions, both of them leading to walls. The eye stares into the darkened room where Miller’s laser has been bouncing through the word “bones bones bones.” Like the crucifixes it seems to be trying to free itself from what it is understood to be. Is it a pair of eyes, or a single eye waiting for its essential neighbour? Why is the companion picture to Sarah Conaway’s color photo of a ikebana arrangement not only black and white but also not really, not quite, a mirror? There is slippage between one ikebana photo and the next, one of Miller’s “bones” and the next, between the cross and the “Crux”.  

Read No Read argues against the possibility of duplication, and without duplication there can be no reading. We learn to read in an atmosphere of faith. The thing that looks like b-o-n-e-s is always bones. Read No Read proposes that this faith is itself an essential misunderstanding. There is no true duplication. Two boneses never really say the same thing. Their way of being is different each time they are written or said. They always mean differently. Art can make this fundamental slippage into objects that seem concrete, and this concreteness can be another layer of misunderstood being. I don’t know if any of this is correct or even convincing; my point is that this exhibition is capable of making you try to figure it out.

* In an interview with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the artist said his stacked pieces “express … the relation of secrecy and the empowerment of hiding along with tendencies to undermine.” Also: “I tend to favor the inscrutable.”  

**The exhibition notes explain that there is another context for these words – “The work is an extraction from Miller’s recent commission and multimedia installation, A Sign, a Signal, the Circus, at the Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis in which the artist expands upon synesthesia as it relates to the Black experience within the United States … a call in repetition for what it means to be alive and to exist within a body at this present moment.”

Read No Read, Sarah Conaway, Sid M. Duenas, Merideth Hillbrand, Nicole Miller, Ragen Moss, Chadwick Rantanen, Rosha Yaghmai at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles, 1010 N Highland Ave Los Angeles, CA 90038. Through September 10, 2022  

Published by Wendy Kveck on September 7, 2022.