Opening reception: March 18, 7-10pm
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 12-6pm

MAKING PLANS brings together a coalition of artists engaging with issues of labor, access, invisibility, and power through various actions. In the introduction to Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974), a transcription of interviews with working people, oral historian Studs Terkel begins by likening work to violence. This “daily humiliation,” is at the root of a Capitalist condition which, as Marx wrote many years prior, “uses up its material factors, its subject and its instruments, consuming them,” yet continues to endure, despite an established discourse and data all but exhausting its systemic flaws and troubled histories.

This violence also emphasizes a search for daily meaning, rationale for the empty hours, dissent and hopelessness of that condition. In MAKING PLANS, new economies of production emerge or return in retaliation, deliberately positioning life and practice in such a way that acknowledges complicity, yet still consistently working to eradicate that which does not work.

If we accept that Capitalism has failed us, but that a true Communism cannot [yet?] be achieved, how do we proceed? As Paulo Freire’s writes,“only human beings are praxis;” a constant and vigilant re-examination of the pervasive, endangering methodologies are needed, so that something else, something better, might arise.

“I’m not so much despairing as asking a question about making plans.”
Fred Moten

Artists in the exhibition include: Astrovandalistas (Rodrigo Frenk, Lleslie Garcia and Thiago Hersan), Di?az Lewis (Alejandro Figueredo Diaz-Perera and Cara Megan Lewis), Ishi Glinsky, Nuttaphol Ma, Jimena Sarno, Aram Han Sifuentes and Kim Zumpfe.

MAKING PLANS is organized by two artists, Kyle Bellucci Johanson and Matthew Lax. An additional essay by Clara Lo?pez Mene?ndez accompanies the exhibition in a book designed by Gia Ahn (online version available here).

ADDITIONAL PROGRAMMING:
Saturday, March 25 @ 4PM Participatory workshop by artist duo Di?az Lewis
Sunday, March 26 @ 6PM Film screening of work by Nuttaphol Ma, Behrouze Rae and others

photos by Christopher Wormald