↳ Exhibitions

David Muenzer at Lord Ludd

October 29, 2016

Artist: David Muenzer

Exhibition title: Essai

Venue: Lord Ludd, Philadelphia, US

Date: September 23 – October 30, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Lord Ludd, Philadelphia

Lord Ludd is pleased to pr esent Essai, David Muenzer’s first solo presentation in Philadelphia.

Muenzer has created Sconces with inscriptions, installed throughout the space. An RSVP list now punctuates each window view, and a tarp, heavy with highlighter juice, obscures the skylight. A blue procession of fingerprints, his and ours, cuts a line across the room.

The name optics refers to the science of lenses—how devices let you see. With a simple change of preposition, however, optics designates how a thing appears to others. This paranoid grammar presupposes the presence of lookers. The crystalline optics on “A More Perfect Union,” Barack Obama’s 2008 speech distancing himself from his longtime pastor, clearly affected the outcome of his candidacy. Although internal relations are essential to the cohesion of a traditional essay, when it comes to political talk, the meaning of words dissolve at their edges. The inner contours of an argument blur while a rhetorical silhouette is immediately identifiable. Another type of essai comes to mind: the pattern coin, a test from which other currency may be struck.

David Muenzer (b. 1987, Pittsburgh) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Scalar-Daemon at Res erve Ames and neverhitsend at 356 Mission Road in Los Angeles. In 2011, he organized 14 & 15, an experimental exhibition on two floors of the Lipstick Building in New York City. He received his BA from Yale University in 2009 and his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2014.