LEHRER-GRAIWER, Sarah (cur.)
Can't Reach Me There

Can't Reach Me There is a catalogue for an exhibition curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, featuring work from; Kelly Akashi, Diti Almog, Christina Forrer, Simone Forti, Jeff Ono, Laura Owens, Mark Roeder, Jay Tucker and Isamu Noguchi at Midway Contemporary Art.

Can’t Reach Me There is a split headspace, an asymmetry of activity and repose, tumult and calm. It is an elusive quiet, a clearing, a bed with a view. It is full of dreams of a languid climate, a slow season, and vast mental space—always a struggle for open vistas. The show, fully estival in spirit, is a postcard from elsewhere. It desires landscapes and perspectives that express vital abstractions like distance, aging, death, and escape. It claims an attention to scale that prioritizes the physically small and shrinking, while valuing the temporally long and lasting. Contained in my there that can’t be reached is a fantasy of withdrawal and inaccessibility, the internal and the remote—of a private, obsessive art that can be the medium of involution. Curling up in a shell, this is also a writer’s fantasy of being non-verbal, non-professional, and non-productive—seeking long-term immersion in private research compelled by pleasure and risking irrelevance. Because I want to be a medium of my time, too.

It is devoted to duration and certain subjectively-clocked experiences of time: the time of observing, the time of painting, the time of weaving, the time of reading and book-making, the time of burning a candle possibly at both ends, the time of bathing, daydream time, calendar time, battery-life time, beach time, afternoon pool time, summer time, slow-burn time, gestation time, and the five hundred million years of the evolution of seashells. Speaking of shells, they turn out to be crucial for their hyper-aesthetic mystery of slow, continuous self-formation that invites a rethinking of domestic architectures—because this show is also informed by a time in life, a generational and perhaps gendered period when home, home-making, and home-building demand greater attention, which comes at the same time that I feel more shell-like and cavernous, cozy in this flesh form.

[publisher's note]

Published by Midway Contemporary Art, 2016
Group Shows