Alex Ito at The Still House Group

Artist: Alex Ito

Exhibition title: Cloud Nine

Venue: The Still House Group, New York, US

Date: October 9 – November 6, 2015

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and The Still House Group, New York

The Still House Group is proud to present Cloud Nine, a solo exhibition by Alex Ito (b. 1991, Los Angeles). A former participant in Still House’s rotating residency program, this is Ito’s second solo presentation with the group.

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This meal tastes like dust, the same we are made of. Coarse, malleable and gray, it was forged from the machine; from the apparatus of “Have A Nice Day”. Catalyzed by principles of hope, the dust promotes life by metabolizing potential in a continuum of progress:

1. necessary movement
2. leads to progress
3. distraction

We sit together and make small talk while flipping through the new season’s tour de force. Did you see page six? I’m constantly refurbishing because I’m an individual, digesting leisure futures from a catalog of impulse. This body is made by choice — or at least what everything around me.

[But I chose it. Don’t forget!]

Fatigued by the stillness of filtered air, the room shifts but remains the same. Outside seems so far away. What poses visible from my window is nothing more than landscapes of trees and dust imagined in captivity. Material anticipation of somewhere to strive for; somewhere that is not here. An illusory image that imprints on the everyday.

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When speaking of the future, the positivity of progress is commonly the basis of a utopian impulse. Ito’s new sculptures and wall-hung works explore futurity and progress through the emotive energy induced by promises of vanity, success and joviality within corporate images; acting as façades of function in the production of everyday life.

For Cloud Nine, Ito provides an arid atmosphere of manufactured materials and modularity. Inhabitancy is alluded to without the allure of comfort, as Ito’s installation is an amalgamation of a domestic proposal, production line, and advertisement. Iron powder seeps from the base of the walls while furniture hosts plastic meals, surrounded by landscape dioramas and advertisements for a critical future. Although seemingly negative, these critical futures and absent spaces hope to stimulate a utopian imagination; the imagination of a radical difference guided by failure in order to contemplate the limits of the familiar world.