Artist: Andy Meerow
Venue: And Now, Dallas, US
Date: June 11 – July 9, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and And Now, Dallas
As a teenager just getting into art, I liked Basquiat. I was drawn to the way he would write a word on the canvas – say milk, or teeth – and then cross that word out. I later learned that this kind of performative editing is called redaction. Struck through with a line of oil stick, Basquiat left his texts legible beneath his edit, so they became meta-writings, at once spoken and un-spoken.
The three sculptures in the front room of this exhibition operate on a similar principle. In each, a common turtle shell is sliced vertically by a blade of mirrored stainless steel. Because it is mirrored, the blade which splits the shell in half also rebuilds it visually. I understand this compression of the made and the unmade, the written and the unwritten, as a way of describing anxiety.
Recently, I’ve been acting in between objects and dividing words. In a joke with myself, I’ve come to think again about that term negative space. Maybe it is some kind of space for negative people? The redactive gesture is useful because it is a line, which we know is no space at all. It is a seam, a fold. I’m interested in this third type of figure, which is neither negative nor positive, and as such, beyond intelligence.
