PARATEXTS
April 18–June 30, 2020
Darren Bader / Alex Bag / Beth Collar / Catharine Czudej / Violet Dennison / Tony Hope / Parker Ito / Jacob Kassay / Helmut Lang / Kayode Ojo / Tabor Robak / Timur Si-Qin / Wickerham and Lomax / Jason Yates
von ammon co. is pleased to announce a fully online group exhibition of video works by gallery artists and special guests. Most of the artists associated with the gallery maintain consistent video and new media practices; this exhibition will provide a new context to show a large number of video works without the normal constraints of physical space.
It came and scooped out all of the chapters of the book. All that remained was paratext—the dedications, the titles, the epigraphs, the footnotes, the prefaces, the afterwords, the indexes. It raided the treasuries of all the bullion and we suddenly all began to exchange IOUs.
The videos were always infectious and polluted the silent spaces—containment was always the great contingency when they were included. Something we remember: putting sullied headphones over our skulls with impunity. Ensconcing a section of prized floorspace with sheetrock to muffle the haunt of a video loop. They were parasitic—haunting flatscreens until we tired of them, sometimes burning their afterimage with their hot plasma. And—most fearfully—they were contagious: capable of multiplicity, able to be truly flat in a system that praises the oblique—whether via its praise of paratext (this press release being no exception) or its belief in places, or: its belief in discrete objects in places—objects displayed obliquely. The promise of multiplicity’s failure. FOCUS GROUP II is flat and the videos do not infect their surroundings—a few dozen pixels of distancing between each non-oblique rectangle—and are ubiquitously nowhere. Each work has been selected in its abundance of contained paratexts, and each is a paean and prologue to all that has been indefinitely postponed.
FOCUS GROUP II is a sequel to FOCUS GROUP, a group exhibition that began at the end of 2019 and ended in 2020. FG2 is the second group show at von ammon co.
