In Practice: Literally means collapse at SculptureCenter

Marco Barrera, Allen Hung-Lun Chen, Violet Dennison, Enrique Garcia, Ignacio Gatica, Cherisse Gray, Jessica Kairé, Alan Martín Segal, Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Stella Zhong, Monsieur Zohore

In Practice: Literally means collapse is an exhibition of new works and artistic meditations that consider the notion of the ruin expanded to include social traditions as well as physical infrastructure. From built environments and structures of circulation to protocols and belief systems that shape social and political subjects, infrastructures are in constant generative friction with decay. Rituals of maintenance are designed and performed to prevent what is constructed from being physically, or subjectively, ruined.

Diagnosing a contemporary obsession with ruins, artist and theorist Svetlana Boym has written, “‘Ruin’ literally means ‘collapse’—but actually, ruins are more about remainders and reminders.”[1] Boym elaborates that as sites, ruins can simultaneously trigger both potential nostalgias and imagined futures. Existing among ruins is existing among spaces of asynchrony—of histories and timescales collapsed.

The artists in the exhibition trace collapse through material and metaphor. Some examine the failures of cities and other containers of information, working with and against the anxieties of deterioration. Others remind us of the strategic disintegration and flattening of symbols and aesthetics. And some embrace the breaking down of space, time, language, and other familiar logics. In Practice: Literally means collapse collects these overlapping studies in the paradoxical timescale of ruin.

[1] Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 43.

In Practice: Literally means collapse is curated by 2022 In Practice Curatorial Fellow Camila Palomino.

In Practice
Since 2003, SculptureCenter’s In Practice open call program has supported the production of new work by more than 250 emerging artists.

Support
Major support for the In Practice program is provided by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In Practice is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Leadership support of SculptureCenter’s exhibitions and programs is provided by Carol Bove, Lee Elliott and Robert K. Elliott, Jill and Peter Kraus, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, Jacques Louis Vidal, Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins, Eleanor Heyman Propp, Libby and Adrian Ellis, Benoit Bosc and Torsten Schlauersbach, Jamie Singer Soros and Robert Soros, Candy and Michael Barasch, Sanford Biggers, Jane Hait and Justin Beal, and Amy and Sean Lyons.