DRUGSTORE KIOSK

Shortly after Kiosk closed at Golden Parachutes it became Drugstore Kiosk and showed again in Los Angeles.

Curated by David Horovitz
DRUGSTORE KIOSK
April 3-9, 2010

RAID will feature:
Marley Freeman, Paul Branca, Mary Walling Blackburn, John Sisley, Miranda Lichtenstein, Annegret Kellner, Emilie Halpern, Barbara Ess, Daniel Gustav Cramer
Alex Klein, Sarah Rara Anderson, Graham Parker, Suzie Silver, Marijke Appelman, Jon Pestoni, Josh Kit Clayton, Amy Lam, Luke Fischbeck, Michael G. Bauer, Avalon Kalin, John Pena, Santos Vasquez, Zach Houston, Michelle Blade, Graham Anderson, Steve Kado, Ken Ehrlich

workspace will feature:

Haris Epaminonda, Marius Engh, Vlatka Horvat, Charlotte Moth
Kristina Lee Podesva, Lisa Tan, Oraib Toukan, Lucy Raven

Drugstore Kiosk will exhibit two new organized projects by David Horvitz that will feature 35 international artists. RAID will debut DRUGSTORE BEETLE (Sitodrepa Paniceum). workspace will re-exhibit Kiosk, recently shown at Golden Parachutes in Berlin.

Horvitz’s practice can be found somewhere in between (or beyond) the two positions of artist and curator. What he produces are frame-works in which other art-works can exist both independently and as a component within the system. These systems examine exchange, distribution, and reproduction – and can be seen as parallel to interfaces and frame-works of contemporary digital-culture.

The project at workspace, titled Kiosk, is an exhibition of 24 5″x7″ photographic prints by 8 artists. The prints were produced using the photo kiosk of a local drug store. These kiosks become places of reproduction and distribution for this exhibition. All 24 image files are freely available for download on workspace’s site, and via a burned CDR in the gallery-space. The show becomes a “traveling show” through dispersive reproduction. The Kiosk exhibition in Berlin will close almost the exact same moment it opens in Los Angeles, 6,000 miles away. A group of international artists were selected whose practices explore various ideas of travel. Lisa Tan’s photographs were all shot in foreign cities, while Kristina Lee Podesva’s focuses on the global nature of contemporary North American life. A trip to Japan is the source of Lucy Raven’s photographs. For Oraib Toukan a juxtaposition on political art tourism: a man photographing the Apartheid Wall in Palestine, within the frame of her own photograph. A supplementary reader will accompany the exhibition that will include texts chosen by the artists. Included will be John Berger, Joan Didion, Homi K. Bhabha, Werner Herzog, Italo Calvino, George Bataille, among others. This will also be available as a PDF download and via the burned CDRs.

In a reverse direction from Kiosk, instead of distributing into the open, DRUGSTORE BEETLE (Sitodrepa Paniceum), exhibited at RAID, aims to infiltrate into a closed circulatory system: the library. Using the process of the library donation, 30 exhibitions-in-a-box were donated by Horvitz to various art libraries around the world. From Los Angeles to New York to Tehran to Shanghai to Denver. Before these exhibitions were gifted, Horvitz purchased an ISBN and coordinated the meta-data for the exhibition to be uploaded into Worldcat, the database librarians use to input and receive a publication’s information. Since the information will exist in two digital databases, the hope is that this exhibition can slip with ease, like a sly fox, into collections around the world (the title refers to the most notorious of book-worms, burrowing into books and shelves). Though, there is certainly the risk of these being rejected, returned, or lost, giving it a similar fate to the open qualities of Kiosk. You never know what may happen to them. Each exhibition contains the work of 27 artists. All works are loose, and contained in a box like structure called a four-flap, an archival casing librarians use to contain loose prints so that they may be shelved with the books in the collection. What results, when accepted, is an exhibition ready to be checked-out. Or, for non-circulatory collections, an exhibition one may view, with white cloth gloves and a surrounding silence, inside of the library by appointment. RAID will be checking out the exhibition from USC’s Architecture and Fine Art Library. On display will be various types of prints, the archival four-flap container, and other documentation/ephemera that surrounds the project. Some works, such as the paintings by Marley Freeman, Paul Branca, and Graham Anderson, will be unique works (at each library is a similar but different painting). Avalon Kalin and Santos Vasquez’s photographs were made inside other libraries. Luke Fischbeck of Lucky Dragons presents small musical notation, which is different at each library and would combine to make the complete piece when played all together. Similarly, Daniel Gustav Cramer has put in a different colored paper in each one, which when combined would form a complete rainbow.

A precedent to DRUGSTORE BEETLE (Sitodrepa Paniceum) is Marcel Duchamp’s boîtes-en-valise, miniature replicas of his work bound in a leather box, which he was making duplicates of. Yet, it is not just the similarity between the exhibition in a box – or the duplicates of identical exhibitions in boxes – but Duchamp’s own trickster qualities. When the Second World War broke out across Europe, Duchamp found himself dressed as cheese buyer from Paris, sneaking the boxes through Occupied France to Marseilles, and then to Lisboa, and then across the Atlantic to New York in 1942. As Duchamp’s boxes were disguised as cheese to cross international borders amidst a World War, these come as gifts amidst hard economic times (an economic period in which libraries are most grateful of donations because many face budget cuts). Yet, unlike the story of the Trojan Horse, this gift is not guised as a gift with the sole intention of infiltration. It is given as a true gift – as a sacrifice, and with nothing expected in return. In the case of Marley Freeman (as with everyone’s pieces): all of her paintings are given away, with the potential of them all disappearing as well. That is the sacrifice.

The time and thought and energy put into something, which in a simple gesture, is given all away.

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