Guided by Invoices is pleased to present Signature Works, a group exhibition of work from gallery artists.
 
The exhibition will include recent paintings from Charles Andresen, Cora Cohen, Nora Griffin, David Rhodes, Sean Scherer, Carol Szymanski, and Rafael Vega. Additionally on view will be new curved-crease origami from Erik and Martin Demaine, a sound installation by Sebastien Leon, and in situ work on the gallery’s windows by Stephen Pusey.
 
Fluorescents after dark, the palette of satellites, Isaac Newton’s solfège rainbow, and hyperbolic origami in red, white and blue: I guess it’s Summer 2013.
 
For further information, please contact info@guidedbyinvoices.us or visit the website www.guidedbyinvoices.us.

Signing, sealing, swallowing, flogging, revealing, casting, unsealing, regurgitating, healing, releasing. Reflection, nested in opposites, is betrayal—this has to be the axiom that marks our starting point, even if we have always already started, always already find ourselves halfway down the road to perdition. Perdition is grace. We have cast our inconsolable eyes on the heavens. We’ve call this Genesis as a way to absolve ourselves. To look up then, this is what eyes are for—eyes in the universal absence of consolation. And this is why the wise, as the Assyrians remind us in their sand-blasted books, sometimes gouged them out with sharpened flint and fed them to the hogs. To see in blindness the blindness of seeing. The binary falters and fails. It fails us. It fails at the moment that the demons are cast out. Masterfully cast out. Dark castings. To cast is to release, to pull from a mold, to make a figure by filling negative space. The opposite of—not the reflection of. From the cast of the godly, then, something ungodly. Legion is not the name(s) of the problem. Only its prompting, the road—a road that bifurcates from the one that leads to graceful perdition—to unsealing the location of the always open but hidden Secret Text, spread out like the firmament itself, that is, the very theological substrate, that reveals that the One is not reflected in the Other, that Good is not the counterpart of Evil. Sealing and unsealing, swallowing and regurgitating, flogging and healing, casting and releasing. Evil and Evil are Two—both released from the same godly mold, but neither, as the shape of its negative hollow, congruent with it. This, then, will be about bearing witness, but not from a margin, not even the margin of seeing. The witnessing of the released. So it will be about failure instead, insofar as “being about” can still sustain itself at the cliff’s edge of incomprehension. Bearing witness in the unwitnessing opened up by the plunge of the witness into the void. The witnessing of the dead witness, the witness without perception. This will be about witnessing and about theology as bearing witness: attestation, testimony, testament. The voiceless testament. The binary falters and fails. The leaping over the side of the cliff can “bear witness” to a theology. It can promise it, it can be a response to it, as to a testamentary promise. Indeed it must, it cannot not, do so. But it is an unworded promise. It’s very unwording is the promise. It can so not do so. And in doing so, it reinforces the very commitment that safeguards it as a testamentary promise. But not with the idea of applying a previously existing form of theology, or of referring to one as to a charter written somewhere else, or of obeying its laws like a transcendent authority, but rather by itself promising, in the act of its event, which is also the act of its debasement insofar as suicide is the graceful disgracing, the foundation of a theology. Of an a-theology. An other theology. A theology of filth. A theology with no believer. Always witnesses, always multiple. But not a theology of the pack, either. Not wolves, not rats. Despicable shit-eaters, never gorging the fecal pies in unison. A theology, an a-theology, of grovelers, of mud-inhabitants. A theology that is no cast, no model, no laws, just pure release. It would be a matter, then, of the suicided witness constituting, through its decision, collective always but never of a collectivity as such, its own theology, a-theology, an un-atheist a-theology that must also, through its generality, become, invent, institute, offer for reading, in an exemplary way, signing it, at the same time sealing it and unsealing it, the possibility of this a-theology, of this bearing witness through death. In the singular. In this instance only. For it can only happen once—this unveiling of the good Evil, of what the good or the godly releases without this release being like itself. Inscribed with the hoof of the suicided in protest, in an effort to illustrate. But this is the space of the un-illustrational. The binary fails here again. The a-theology comes, emerges, consolidates, in the event itself, in the double-event of the suicide and the witnessing of the suicide, false of mirror or no mirror but a witness of the double-event of the Christ’s casting out and casting in the demonic. It is the mastery of casting in, of possessing the living with the demonic, guiding this event. This double-event is its singularity (suicide as witnessing), even as it imperfectly doubles, while un-doubling it, another singularity (Christ jamming the demonic in the bodies of the innocent). It’s its repeatable—insofar as it is theology—unrepeatability. At a particular date, on the day that the Christ cast the demons across the species-boundary, in an absolute violation, a violation of not any law in particular, by a violation as itself, as such, as Event, abominable enough to instill mortal fear in the villagers, at the both unique and repeatable—that is, unrepeatable repeatable—date of a signature, of a signed abominable act of exorcism and possession, the negation of itself already nested in the act, canceling it out, making it the historical negative act par excellence, the Evil Event, something—or rather a nothing—that could be answered, that could be attested to, that could be witnessed, and, at the same time, flogging the binary one more time, witnessed only by an act of negation equally radical, radically enough to establish a counter-theology, an outside to theology—the leaping of the hogs over the side of the cliff. The immaculate assumption of the impossible task.The generation of a reminder, a trace that vanishes with the life of the suicide, outside of the Two—of the evil of the demonic and of the evil of the Christ. The jump, in other words, is the inscription of evil in the world, not the evil of the leapers, the porcine evil, but the very evil that is at the heart of the figure of the Christ, the evil that marks the release—the figure—constituted in the hollow of the godly cast. The swine are the lambs that unmask the Lamb as Goat, that establish the undeniability of the Two. The leap carries reference beyond itself, beyond reference, to where evil establishes a different kind of world, clocked in the veils of theology, of ungodly Son birthed by the God-Father, the Cast of Perfection, establishing the universal absence of consolation. The swine is inedible because it belongs to a world we can’t measure up to.

The Hole is proud to present a sister exhibition to our current survey of figurative painting, XSTRACTION, that surveys new approaches to abstraction. Expanding upon the themes introduced in the two exhibitions at Deitch Projects “Substraction” curated by Nicola Vassell and “Constraction” curated by Kathy Grayson, this show will present all the various strategies young and established artists are using to make abstract painting exciting and urgent. The exhibition will be accompanied by an “encyclopedic” book of the same title available June 1.

International Print Center New York presents New Prints/New Narratives: Summer 2013, consisting of some fifty projects by artists at all stages of their careers. The exhibition will be on view at 508 West 26th St, 5th Floor, from June 13, 2013 - August 9, 2013. New Prints/New Narratives: Summer 2013 is the forty-fifth presentation of IPCNY’s New Prints Program, a series of juried exhibitions organized by IPCNY several times each season featuring prints made within the past year. The exhibition will run concurrently with a small selection of prints and artists’ books from the collaboration, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, which will be shown in the IPCNY Viewing Room.
 
Prints were selected by Andrew Raftery, an artist, engraver and print scholar, specializing in narrative scenes of American life. Born in 1962, he earned his BFA in painting from Boston University and his MFA in printmaking from Yale University. Raftery is a professor at Rhode Island School of Design and a faculty fellow at the RISD Museum. IPCNY received over 2,400 submissions from artists and presses worldwide, and out of this varied collection of work, he chose 55 works. An illustrated brochure with a curatorial essay by Andrew Raftery will accompany the exhibition.
 
The Artists’ List is as follows: Lynne Allen, Kathy Aoki, Miguel Aragon, Katie Baldwin, Kristin Becker, Mildred Beltre, Allison Bianco, Douglas Bick, Doug Bosely, Alice Leora Briggs, Veronica Ceci, Liz Chalfin, Ann Chernow, Nick Conbere, Madeline D’Aversa, Amze Emmons, Richard Falle, Leslie Golomb, Art Hazelwood, Ellen Heck, Marco Hernandez, Yuji Hiratsuka, Jill Ho-You, Erik Hougen, Cary Hulbert, Jon Irving, Hans Johansson, Gabriela Jolowicz, Mehrdad Khataei, Joyce Kozloff, Brian Kreydatus, Dinh Q. Lê, Jim Lee, Kate Logue, Joseph Lupo, Nicole Maloof, Michael Menchaca, Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, Florent Morellet, Kurt Pammer, Ryan Parker, Ester Partegàs, Lynn Peterfreund, Kahlil Rintye, Jenny Robinson, Bill Salzillo, Hannah March Sanders, Jesse Shaw, Dan Steeves, Ivanco Talevski, Matthew Van Asselt, Art Werger, George Whitman, Michelle Wilson and Erin Woodbrey.
 
Presses and publishers represented are: Cascade Press (OH); Centre for Fine Print Research (UK); Center Street Studio (MA); Connecticut Fine Arts, Inc (CT); Flatbed Press (Texas); the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies; Columbia University (NYC); Marginal Editions (NYC); Morakeb-e Siah Institute of Fine Art (Iran), Mullowney Printing (CA), Philagraphika (PA); Rocinante Press (CA).
 
New Prints/New Narratives: Summer 2013 consists of etchings, lithographs, monotypes, screenprints, books and video, and other manifestations of the printmaking process. Highlights include Richard Falle’s Ice Cream Inferno, an inkjet print from original vector artwork created entirely in Adobe Illustrator and printed at the Center for Fine Print Research in the UK; Allison Bianco’s glow-in-the-dark intaglio and silkcreen piece, the Old Man of the Mountain; a 35-second animation, Storm in a Teacup 124, created from 124 unique monotypes by Lynn Peterfreund; and Nicholas Conbere’s detailed and dreamlike invented world, Finding Niches. This exhibition explores visual narrative and the powerful presence it has had in printmaking since its origins. The prints shown here reinvent this tradition for contemporary viewers, and were selected through careful observation of specific details and then arranged into narrative categories such as direct address, layered narrative, aftermath, layered time, and implied communication.
 
New Prints/New Narratives is a counterpart to Visualizing Time: Narrative Print/fron the National Academy.