The interior of Red Head Gallery for REMAINS reminds me of the soft launch of a construction site. A drill filled with sand lays discarded on its side; the motor buzzing faintly makes my ear ring. Three metal-looking beams are propped up against the wall. They’re made of wood but painted varying shades of cool-toned grey. I didn’t get a picture of the whole space when I went to the opening, but the artworks are quite spread out around the gallery. Apart from the computer contraption set up in the middle, the contents appear very conceptual. As always, I consult with the oracle (the curatorial text) after my first walk-around.

“Materials and memories: remains are the lively afterlives of things. To remain isn’t to be rigid or immobile, as the imperative ‘remain!’ implies. Remains are finicky and not easily categorized, stuff that is left over around the edges or that has wiggled free from its original context. Transformations from originals to remnants draw into question the processes of iteration, copy, and decay. Networks of remnants reshuffle and connect distant places and times, and the remnant object allows for an exploded notion of presence that exists in multiplicity, in malleable time.”

Sticky and highly contextual. That’s how I’d describe the remains on display.  In the corner, high up on the wall is Callum Donovan-Grujicich’s faux groin vault installation, “Medieval Corner.” I initially didn’t notice or register the vault as an artwork when I came in. I thought it was simply an odd quirk of the gallery. The bottom is arched but the top of the work looks like a thick flat shelf, which from my height and position on the ground, caused me to bypass it on my first go-around. The ironic performance of structural utility was sadly totally lost on me! If the intention was to “activate” the space, perhaps another color other than gallery white? I think a slightly off-white could’ve worked better.

Sohyun Yoon’s “Remnant Project” immediately drew my attention since it not only took up the largest space in the gallery, but was also made out of an interesting and contrasting set of materials– wooden boxes and computer screens. On the screens, Yoon depicts images of decontextualized architectural and infrastructural objects like light switches, water pipes, and concrete bollards. The wall behind the installation also contains a projected image of what appears to be a hole in the ground. In her statement, Yoon writes, “As images of remnants, the absence of the subject is presumed. The relationship of existence may only become complete when viewed from the perspective of what remains.” 

As it happens, it never occurred to me to question whether the objects were still in existence or not. I suppose I assumed they were, but that the intention of the installation was about the arrangement of discarded materials rather than the video/photograph’s content. (The clustering of the screens call to mind Nam June Paik’s television installation sets). I have to say though, I like Yoon’s interpretation of remnant archives (and perhaps the archive as a remnant) more than my own. 

Patrick Stochmal has three works in this show which appear from right to left across the back wall: “Next of Kin,” “Eros,” and “Til Death Do Us Part.” Out of all the artists in REMAINS, I find his work to be the most conceptual of the lot. I like conceptual art but I worry about the “trust me bro” energy of some of it. For Stochmal’s installation, it’s almost essential for the viewer to read the didactic to understand the work, and even then there are some things to parse. “Recalling how you cradled (and still cradle) my flesh, I collect fragments of your heterogeneous being, I delineate imperfect cartographies of the spaces and bodies incubated within one another through our soft embraces of loving but sometimes fraught contamination,” reads the second line of the didactic material. It strikes me as a vaguely clinical and particularly galleristic declaration of love and affection.

The materials shared across the works on view are key to understanding how the artist turns a concept into a remnant. Leaf litter & organic detritus, microbes, nutrient agar, bacteria, hydrosol composed of distilled leaf litter, rotting logs, dirt, wild mold & saprophytic fungi (“from sites of personal intimate queer encounters”), urine (“from the queer bodies of myself and my partner”), body and face cream, and MDF are mixed in varying combinations into each work. (I’m not going to pretend to understand why urine is a component there. Why not spit? Why not a pair of eyelashes? Why not anything else?)* 

For the most part in “Next of Kin,” “Eros,” and “Til Death Do Us Part,” the materials have not moved beyond their material form. They are a mixture of ingredients propped up on plinths and in display boxes. Is it sculpture? No, I don’t think so. Instead, I rather regard this as performance. A performance of mixture and decay. That said, I can’t say I found this performance particularly engaging on a surface level. Similarly on the point about performance, Ariane Labbé’s installation “Dry Displacement” is a rehearsal of slow repetitive movement. The drill, or “churning machine,” displaces sand along its body, spinning it into a pile deposited at the base of the drill. Admittedly, I arrived a bit late so the effect seemed rather lessened. Unfortunately for this type of installation, to get its most potent effect sand would continually have to be deposited into the top of the drill to be displaced down the body. 

(I’m in love with Marina Diolaiti’s rubber band installation “Left to a next of kin.” Stretched between two nailed endpoints, the rubber bands measure time and space. The design is minimal but evocative. I want to run up and strum them like a guitar.)

Caro Simon’s sculptures of underground water catch-basins in “Residuum, or, Something that remains continues to exist when other things no longer do” grasps at the central point of REMAINS. While not particularly interesting as aesthetic objects, Simon catalyzes the move from discarded infrastructure (or “objects”) to remnants. This definition is reiterated again and again: a remnant is a thing with a past. Paradoxically, the gallery becomes a site of unintentional(?) transformation, as the objects transition from remnants to artwork. 

While not necessarily for this exhibition to answer, I conclude with some final thoughts & questions: What happens when a remnant enters the affective energy of the white cube space? Can an artwork stay a remnant or does its nature change somehow when placed in a gallery?  What temporal dissonances are produced in the encounter between the remnant, the art object, and the static, stable gallery? And what might this suggest about white cube temporal hierarchies?

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*My main issue with putting p!ss/peepee/urine in a gallery is that it inevitably seems to bestow upon it a higher meaning than it being just pee. Always it has to mean something else or represent something else to get a gallery pass, when in reality it’s just excrement. It’s really no different than putting shit in a jar. And everyone shits, so it’s not that interesting.