The financial stock exchange is an arena that extracts information and indexes it for trade. A set of representational names and codes for industries in action. The values fluctuate on entities reacting to each other, in a worldwide exchange that is directly affected through a public funding it. Drawing in participants with the thrill of the hunt. An encapsulation of danger-induced adrenaline channelled through the medium of a coupon book. Let's strike a deal. Let's get those dollars. Let’s hit the ground running.
Thus Pits and Platforms takes its title as a formal meeting place for action, of the shoe on the ground. It was inspired by a found riddle and a mysterious notice to employees signed by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (1977). The document presents a dress code update. A Notice: to employees that platform shoes were no longer allowed in the trading pits, due to injuries. It gives an example of a moment where femme gesture or pose is being limited.
The shoe height narrative of restrictions also points out the term platform in contrast to an open outcry trading floor called ‘pits’. Emphasizing the contact ‘sport’ of investment trading by officially requiring athletic uniforms from its traders. Drawing a parallel to an Olympic wrestling match. A reference to a historical meeting place, of people exchanging with excitement, tension and force directly. Investment* being an otherwise disembodied form of violence that is tangled up with a global financial marketplace.
The riddle hints at the formal description of the platform as a larger context for presenting/ speaking/making taller. Emphasizing here the funny discord of a meeting place with a 1970’s fashionable platform shoe, in a ‘pit’. This open outcry form for investment trading has almost vanished in recent years. Chicago Mercantile Exchange closed the trading floors in 2015. It can be deduced that almost all of the stock trading done today, is without concern to ankle safety.
We ask the public to please watch your step on the way down to the gallery.
For the exhibition Pits and Platforms, questions of violence, value and material will intersect through the installation of film, painting, gates, photographs, dyed rug painting and perfume. Punctuated by an opening and closing ceremony 15 minute film screenings, on December 21 2024 and January 4th 2025 at 12 pm.
Dec 21st 2024 will mark the solstice, beginning this event by screening Unspeakable Heap (2023) by Kara Ditte Hansen. The film sets a tone for the exhibition, with a story told as a family narrative. An accumulation of histories is explored via the filmmaker's uncle, a retired Greco-Roman Olympian wrestler (1972 games) who lives in a sinking house built atop a decommissioned landfill. This presentation of an arena is full of figurative tensions, layered over secrets hidden in the soil.
The gallery exhibition includes contributions by
Kara Ditte Hansen (b.1991, Calgary, CAN.) Lucy Stein (b.1979, Oxford, UK.) Vanessa Disler (b.1987, Vancouver, CAN.) Sands Murray-Wassink (b.1974,Topeka, USA.) Emily C R Hill (b.1987, Vancouver, CAN.) Megan Hepburn (b.1982, Vancouver, CAN.)
Central to the opening event will be a scent work Alka Seltzer Stars Scattered on Blue Felt by Megan Hepburn diffused into the gallery. The circulating scent, with its intoxicating aroma, will activate the gallery space as a flowing psycho-sexual presence. Like an exhale of the exhibition to be consumed directly by the public.
Like signposts on a desolate stretch of desert highway, Bad Dad Divorce Sculpture gates by Vanessa Disler, (hand bent and welded out of construction rebar) will partition the exhibition space. These unevenly spaced gates will refer to the story of DAD. It is the story of his prime, only decipherable through fragments of images, signs and words that shift in and out of focus. Dad is trying hard to forget his past and emotions; this is why he makes the gates. Working through the metal, the gates manifest repressed memories of his time as broker and deals gone bad.
“... remember the days when Margo was 'a' blond."
The dyed rug paintings' by Emily C R Hill have a wool surface that mimics the coats of a sheep. With unspun fleece woven together rather than skinned; these rug supports become an alternative canvas marked with protein specific dye. Carded and styled (hand brushed, teased and gelled) In this presentation they will line the entrance staircase as a walkable surface. Attached to bend to each stair, and descend onto the floor of the main exhibition space. These hallucinogenic trophies / reminders from exhibitions past, present differently here. Their material is capable of draping over forms, developing a history of iterations. Being dirtied, and washed. This dyed rug painting installation traces the architecture and repetitive L shapes of each stair, each platform, until reaching the gallery floor. Acting as unreflective mirage ponds to a vertical face on each bending step.
Adding to the story of Pits and Platforms will be a large photographic installation of 60 scans of photos, printed on paper on one wall. This Sands Murray-Wassink work is titled Identity Shots or Before Robin, After Hannah Wilke (1995) which refers to its own making in relationship to a personal narrative. A timestamp of ‘before’ the artist met partner Robin, and ‘after’ the art historical narrative of Hannah Wilke. Wilke mimicked fashion magazine poses of the 1970’s, with exaggerated ‘femme’ gestures as part of an ongoing ‘performalist self-portraits’. This is a signature body of her life’s work. Both Wilke and Murray-Wassink make documents as photographs that can be looked at as evidence. Evidence of bodies working to tell a larger story of embodied actions within a western art history. Offering the artist as form. Wilke, as a frontline leader of an embodied feminist practice, is one of many who Murray-Wassink platforms by keeping their names present in titles and conversation on his work. Murray-Wassink continues an urgent legacy, to interrupt patriarchal systems in art. This particular example was produced, 1995 at De Ateliers, Amsterdam. It is only the second time the work has been presented publicly.
Pits and Platforms digs into a trade. With objects trading with each other. Situated above the staircase, is a text oil painting in the entrance and foyer by Lucy Stein. The words ‘BIG PHARMA PIG FARMER’ are subtracted, as wiped from an oil ground. A rhyme, duo concept which can be understood as flowing from her prolific body of work with oil painting. Stein's work communicates with an athletic force. Discipline here, pushes oil on wood panels like a potion that melts medium with the very worker who marks it. Sweat is evidence of processing the world, moving in it. Stein ritually marks her experiences and indexes a textuality, through paintings that convey an intricate processing of personal experiences. A language shared, as images from its own circuit. Stein's logic is born into a long tradition of figures as form, that has built on itself. Accessing deep embodied knowledge.
*Investment: the most disembodied form of violence.. Impossible to sit zazen in the 18th century stable exquisitely converted to a zendo here on Sagaponack Road without wondering who spawned the yields maintaining this estate... My first experience with sadism was in the Park Avenue penthouse of a bank executive, admiring the Haitian art up on the walls. I stammered, it's a very violent country. Why yes, he smiled... The true sophisticate has attained the psychological refinement to be aware not only of the work but the cruelty that's fetishised in things- don't judge, he says, enjoy it. Museum-quality tapestries from Port-au-Prince, hearts dripping sequinned blood above the wing chairs, everything is tainted - WHO MAKES YOUR LIFE POSSIBLE? I want to scream. (Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia, 150)
Curated by Emily C R Hill
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