Josh Minkus at Species

Artist: Josh Minkus

Exhibition title: Spalt Spelt Spelter

Venue: Species, Atlanta, US

Date: August 20 – 27, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Species

A list imposes order and creates equivalency between things listed. To date, Species has exhibited fifty-one artworks by eleven artists in a total of five exhibitions. On August 20th, 2016, Species will present “Spalt Spelt Spelter,” a solo exhibition by Josh Minkus.

The word spalt comes from spalten, to split, meaning brittle wood, prone to splitting. Spalting is the discoloration of wood caused by fungi. Though a fungus typically weakens a hardwood, spalted wood is prized by wood workers for visual effect— white rot, zone lines, bluestain. And spalt as variant of spelter, crude smelted zinc, zinc alloy, or just zinc. So a metaphor maybe, disease made decorative virtue, the symbiotic rhizome, and quite literally, sculptures made of zinc.

Minkus composes inventories of many small sculptures around rectilinear hubs sized after 11×17 tabloid paper, humanscaled points of registration. A correlative is drawn between the sculptural objects and poetic text. The letters of a word, the words on a page, line breaks and stanzas as containers and vehicles. Not that raw material = letter or word, but that the structural circuit board of tactile and symbolic stuff, scaled to something relatable like the twiddling of fingers, if not to the trundling of a human body, takes us from here to there, like moving across a page, or leafing through. Bounded things and their total. Items on a list and the list itself.

Josh Minkus (b. 1985 Elk, CA) lives in Hamilton, NY. Recent exhibitions include Bodega, New York; Pied-à-terre, Ottsville PA; Right Window, San Francisco; Sydney, Sydney; and Centre for Style, Melbourne. Past exhibitions include Important Projects, Oakland, and Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn.