Nor Heat Nor Gloom of Night

28.05.2018 - 17.06.2018

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles, Los Angeles / United States

Nor Heat Nor Gloom of Night ties the various themes surrounding the post office as both topos and place between private and public domain to pressing questions concerning transgression, censorship, and migration. Transcontinental and international train-, truck-, ship-, and air mail carrier routes such as contemporary digital systems connect through love letters, political activism, obituaries, bills, governmental notifications, complaints, and ‘correspondence art.’ But these networks and nervous systems imply as well disconnection, staying on hold, undeliverability, and blanks of various kinds....

While the exhibition’s title is partly inspired by the United States Postal Service creed, the exhibition’s display is influenced by the urban planner Otto Wagner. The year 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of his death. One of the architecturally most outstanding postal offices of the 20th Century is the Austrian Postal Savings Bank (Österreichische Postsparkasse) in Vienna, in which Wagner followed the ideals of Secession—a progressive group of artists, architects, and designers who favored collaborative models of creation over individual authorship to create a Gesamtkunstwerk: the ‘total work of art.’

Following this train of thought, a cubicle equal to the dimensions of the cash element of the Postal Savings Bank, is translated into the Bendix Building in Los Angeles (in which the gallery Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angelesis situated). It frames the artistic contributions to investigate the post office in a case study. The notion of the total work of art, which is due to transformation, asks for re-imagination: medial and structural architectures such as transitory hauntings of the mailing system, analog and virtually, are addressed within this artistic and curatorial Austrian/US-American exchange project by Arno Böhler + Susanne Valerie Granzer, DIE DAMEN, Danica Phelps, Elke Silvia Krystufek, Joseph Dumbacher John Dumbacher, Kelly Ann Gardener, Manuel Carreon Lopez, Michael Niemetz, and Sara Drake + Nina Sarnelle

[Quelle: http://www.tigerstrikesasteroid.com/ (30.07.2018)]