NEW DIALECTIC MEMORIES
Lindsay August-Salazar
February 22 - March 22
Opening Saturday February 22, 5-8pm
with a performance at 5:30-6pm
The mimetic impulse is synonymous with the movement of bodies, in synch, dancing. Choreography takes different forms: visual data at a passive constant, the straying of information away from the haunt of the present, and Rudolf von Laban’s dance notation to name a few. Choreographic structures often referred to as social media platforms are complete with a new kitsch, an old rhetoric, the furor’s guise, and they produce a self as smooth as glass – a body without flesh.
The exhibition, built from the Abstract Character Copies (ACC) – a choreographic language designed by the artist, positions two large floor to ceiling scrolls made from refraction grading film and painted ACC signs as a central material concern. Simultaneously translucent, opaque, mirroring and holographic in nature, the film itself both refracts and captures the viewer’s body as visage and also as a tool for reproduction. Unlike commonly held media platforms, the human instinct to mimic is exploited neither for data nor passivity, but instead for the active engagement of the body. Striated with painted choreographic signs, these media feeds cum sculptural scrolls, implicate the possibility of a mimesis of the ethically conscious sort. Not unlike forbearers in the history of painting who have positioned abstraction as tied to the human potential to transcend hegemonic power, these two works hang and loop, like paintings being strung across Greene Street or striped, abstract posters pasted around Paris in decades past.
Doubling down on the relevance of Salazar’s core métier, the ACC language, is a looping video reorganizing the space of the screen to the projection of an image onto painted drywall. Moving both forward and backward, not hiding the computer’s auto corrections of the artist’s own bespoke font, the rhythm of the video work makes explicitly a temporality implicit in the hanging scrolls.
Concurrent with the opening of the exhibition: the gallery will host a performance by the artist that shifts the complexity of the temporality in the exhibitions’ images to the inherently destabilizing space of the artist’s dance based performance. Stemming from her development in Los Angeles as the daughter of a Russian Jewish mother and a Spanish-French-Native American father from Mexico, a member of the Yaqui tribe, Salazar’s practice continually re-inscribes new codes of body based movement. These share a language devoid of auditory and phonetic codes, consistently providing the viewer with an affective and temporal palpability of a future yet made, still ever forward thinking, even within a dystopic political climate.
Private Places is pleased to present a new exhibition by Los Angeles based artist and choreographer Lindsay August-Salazar.
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August-Salazar received her BFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008 and her MFA from University of California, Irvine in 2013. As a graduate student, she worked with Simone Forti and Simon Leung, and was a member of the last class to learn Trio A, taught by Yvonne Rainer. She is a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award. A Medici scholar and recipient of numerous travel grants, which aided the development of her choreographic vocabulary. Salazar’s dance lexicon grew through her work with the Studio Program at Redact (Los Angeles). Her work has been discussed in publications including X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Modern Painters, Art in America, and The New York Times. Following the exhibition of her recent work at Private Places (Portland, OR), Salazar will be releasing her first catalog published by Not A Cult and working as artist in residence at Outono Projects (Lisbon) in the summer of 2020.
PP
2400 NE Holladay Street Portland OR 97232
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Gallery Hours: Open by appointment while exhibitions are on view. Email info@privateplaces.us to schedule your visit.
PP Plus One Exhibition Series is supported by:
