Without A Solitary Object of Vision

Curated by Rashmi Viswanathan
Site-specific work by Samuelle Green and Amina Ahmed
March 9th - May 5th, 2019
601Artspace, 88 Eldridge St.

View installation shots of the exhibition
View information about the Hussein Smko performance

Curator’s Statement

The act of looking is conventionally an exercise in isolation, as the object of our gaze calls for a fixed space of attention and concentration. When looking at art, the viewer is most often asked to extract a work from its immediate environment, and to be quiet and still in its presence.

Without a Solitary Object of Vision pushes against the normative conventions of museumized viewing by focusing on two artistic practices that neither privilege a fixed space, nor ask for stillness from the body of the viewer. On the contrary, the artists Amina Ahmed and Samuelle Green create extensive site-specific work that invites motion, shifts perspectives, and offers disorientation as experience.

Ahmed’s large-scale repetitive line work and Green’s heaving coral reefs of detritus alter the contours of traditional gallery space, as hard edges and walls are lost to organic undulations. Using paper, marks, and everyday material, Ahmed’s tactile, radial forms invoke spiritual geometries. Green’s swelling forms use the lightness of paper and its shades of decay to draw the senses into conversation.

There is no discernable sequence or grouping of objects here, no clear focus, no solitary object of vision. The work purposefully disorients, inviting full body experiences of color and texture that draw the viewer to multiple centers, offering neither a single site of focus nor a unitary experience. Without a Solitary Object of Vision asks - can visceral physical input challenge our preconceptions about how a body relates to an art object? Can multisensory experience challenge the role of the white cube in determining meaning?

Image: Samuelle Green, Manifestation 2, courtesy of the artist