Adriana Ramić at inge

Artist: Adriana Ramić

Exhibition title: It also disappears

Venue: inge, New York, US

Date: July 2 – September 18, 2022

Photography: All images are Courtesy of the artist and inge, New York

A CHICKEN DOES not know it came from an egg. Effects cannot know their own causes. I understand this in terms of images; something that only reflects light cannot be looked into, something that only draws in light cannot be looked at. What an image [a chicken] is blocking with itself is not the light coming from behind it, but what it’s blocking with itself is its back.

Its back is not a linear transform of its other sides. The chicken is not a stutter of self-same images, all referring back to an originary crack. Rather, in itself, it’s like a family, uncomfortably related to one another, each a puffed up space of refraction.

The chicken’s back is the egg, and it is unknowable. The egg came first but you don’t have access to firsts. Firsts develop seconds, seconds envelop firsts, and so seconds cannot know firsts, because they are from firsts. As soon as anything is knowable, you’re already beyond firsts.

Chicken [scaled vector], envelope—all I observe are effects: moss on stone. We cannot see from inside a stone or the backside of a forward facing image. This may be the case with many things, but especially so with eggs, flower buds, machines, minds, speaker boxes—closed spaces where magic tricks take place.

Though seconds develop in a sequence of unfoldings, they come onto stage in a flash. Does it unfold its overlapping petals sequentially in a cascade of elegant curves, or does it enter the scene as an apparition whole, striking a pose at once, holding for only a flash, because the world rarely allows for extremes, because it is an entropic trash bin.

The egg is incapable but productive in that it doesn’t merely contain information; it gains information. You do not hear sound waves but a voice. You do not see droplets but a cloud. We see the speaker that the voice is emitted from, which is smaller than what comes out of it. An egg can break things or be broken, reveal surfaces to be slanted, balance on the equinox. Yet, you do not see an egg.

Seeing is not-seeing and anticipating-seeing. As you’re seeing, you’re immediately not-seeing. All at once, in the dark: you’re seeing, you’re recognizing, you’re enacting that recognition, by reimplementing priors, and increasing the chances of seeing it again. Foresight by backsight, you cannot peel one from the other; we go from recording to projecting immediately.

Stacks of double sided photographs [passageways] can draw a face of non-change, an internal infinity. Drawn by frequency and resonance, beyond remembering and forgetting, everything is recorded, impressed and indexed into an ever-recombinable volume. Petits perceptions equal petits manifestations and petits unmanifestations in runaway recombinations.

The chicken’s life of unknowing the egg does not play out on a projection screen but is the sediment from subsurface computation and is also in itself computational. The score-like nature of nature turns bodies into sound boards. Musical notation comes after biology; it does not incite but recalls. Reflection, refraction and dispersion through droplets. What if the light could turn around and meet itself?

—Temra Pavlović