ZEPHYR GALLERY
PROJECT
12
BLIND CONTOURS April 1 – May 21, 2016
Robin LaMer Rahija Jenée Rue Sastry
Jenée Rue Sastry Way Station, 2015, Digital composite, archival pigment print, 36” x 52”
Blind Contours 47 years ago, or maybe just a few, a town was formed along a river or a sea or at the foot of a mountain by a band of women determined to invent new modes of selforganization. The experiment was short-lived and poorly documented, an effect of its absolute success and total inaccessibility. This exhibition seeks to document and recuperate a town that wasn’t by charting its many thresholds, way stations, and escape routes. Blind Contours is a collaboration between photographer Jenée Rue Sastry and poet Robin LaMer Rahija. Divided between Zephyr Gallery’s two floors, the exhibition is, to a degree, an allegory of the collaborative process itself—a series of independent starts and departures that resolve into an endlessly shifting Terra nullius. Rue Sastry’s previous work has explored the mental acrobatics required to organize and make sensible the visible world. Often, her images render pictorial the inextricability of seeing and thinking. Rahija’s poetry, and her abiding commitment to the visual and book arts, often take up the relationship between language and knowledge, and the production or fabrication of our world through the logic and rules of writing and speech. In this exhibition, the artists have tasked their work with navigating the relationship between production and recuperation—between inventing a world and explaining or understanding it. In so doing, Rue Sastry and Rahija pressure the divide between image and text, seeing and reading, and blindly trace the contours between self and world. The departure points for the exhibition are numerous. Conceptually, it owes much to the work of the Atlas Group, a collective invented by artist Walid Raad to fabricate a parafictional Lebanese contemporary history. In this respect at least, the project maintains a political aesthetic. But the waypoints are varied. Other touchstones include Sherwood Anderson’s semi-fictional town of Winesburg, Ohio and Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal journey—a journey that has been disarticulated across the many scrolls of Moby Dick (2016). In these works, inversions of scale and number act on the viewer like the potions, cakes, and mushrooms of Alice’s Wonderland, facilitating entrances to and exits from fantastical worlds and impossible situations (the cetacean becomes the murine in Moby Dick, for example, while the viewer seems to grow or shrink in front of the elephants of Chess Pieces (2009) or the tiny hand print at the center of Silver Vessel (2009)). Looking, in these works, becomes a kind of writing—a drawing-into the picture of the viewer-reader. But it is a writing—a language—that ultimately collapses; a failed logos that first produces a world and then becomes irrelevant to it. Chris Reitz 2016
Robin LaMer Rahija Notebook Page #1, 2016
Artist Biographies Jenée Rue Sastry is a photographic artist who currently lives in Louisville, KY. She received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in history and is a certified User Experience/Human Factors practitioner. Her passion for studying aspects of cognition began in childhood and she has been applying this knowledge to help Fortune 500 companies, non-profits and startups alike design experiences for over 20 years. She recently received a BFA in photography from the Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville. Her work reflects her interdisciplinary background and interest in the analytical and mysterious aspects of cognition. She has been featured in The Courier-Journal, Today’s Woman magazine as well as several exhibitions including the international exhibition, My World is a Family, for which she won a jury award. Robin LaMer Rahija is a poet and paper artist. In 2010, she moved to Lexington, KY, where she and her husband, Greg Lamer, started Rabbit Catastrophe Press, a micropress that publishes hand-bound chapbooks, literary journals, and art books. Her paper art has been shown at the Bread Box Studio and Lexington Art League, and she has been the featured poet at Holler, Peabody Reading Series, Black Sheep Reading Series and Chase Public. Her poetry has appeared in the Tusculum Review, Gargoyle, PANK and elsewhere. She will receive her MFA from the University of Kentucky in May 2016.
Curator Biography
Chris Reitz is Gallery Director and Assistant Professor of Critical and Curatorial Studies at the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville. He received his PhD in contemporary art from Princeton University in 2015. Prior to work at Princeton, Chris was a Project Manager at Public Art Fund in New York and an independent curator. He has curated exhibitions in New York, Louisville, and Paris, has written for Texte zur Kunst, N+1, and Art Agenda, and has contributed to exhibition catalogues on subjects ranging from Kosovar video art to the work of Santiago Sierra.
Exhibition Checklist Jenée Rue Sastry
Robin LaMer Rahija
Chess Pieces, 2009 Digital composite, archival pigment print 54” x 36”
Moby Dick, Artist Edition, 2016 Paper scraps, dimensions variable
Gothic Stairwell, 2015 Digital composite, archival pigment print 55” x 36” Minaret, 2009 Digital composite, archival pigment print 51” x 36” Silver Vessel, 2009 Digital composite, archival pigment print 36” x 54” Staircase, Bottom Up, 2016 Digital composite, archival pigment print 54” x 36” Wall, 2015 Digital composite, archival pigment print 36” x 54” Way Station, 2015 Digital composite, archival pigment print 36” x 52” Waterfall, 2013 Digital composite, archival pigment print 54” x 36” Descending, 2015 Digital composite, archival pigment print 54” x 36”
Paper Forest, 2016 Paper scraps, dimensions variable Notebook #1, 2016 Archival pigment print, 11”x 14” Notebook #2, 2016. Archival pigment print, 11”x 14” Notebook #3, 2016 Archival pigment print, 11”x 14” Notebook #4, 2016 Archival pigment print, 11”x 14” Book Jig #1, 2016 Wood, paper scraps, ink, metal nails Book Jig #2, 2016 Wood, paper scraps, ink, metal nails Wall Labels, 2016
Zephyr Gallery Artist Board
Patrick Donley Ken Hayden Peggy Sue Howard Chris Radtke Brenda Wirth
Artist Partners Matt Meers Robert Mitchell Joel Pinkerton Reba Rye
PROJECT 12: Blind Contours Chris Reitz Jessica Oberdick Robert Mitchell Chris Radtke Peggy Sue Howard Patrick Donley
Curator Project Manager Graphic Design Exhibition Co-Coordinator Exhibition Co-Coordinator Exhibition Preparator
Image Credit
Front Cover: Jenée Rue Sastry Chess Pieces, 2009, Digital composite, archival pigment print 54” x 36”
The mission of Zephyr Gallery is to serve as a platform to incubate, advocate, and facilitate innovative ideas in art and artistic practices in the region. In 2014, Zephyr launched an ongoing Project series with curated proposal-based exhibitions as well as collaborations with universities, colleges, and cultural institutions. Project 12: Blind Contours is the twelfth exhibition in this series.
610 East Market Street | Louisville, KY 40202 www.zephyrgallery.org | Thursday–Saturday, 11–6