The Order of Shadowboxing at Et al.

Artists: Alex Ito and Greg Ito

Exhibition title: The Order of Shadowboxing

Venue: Et al., San Francisco, US

Date: September 25 – October 31, 2015

Photography: images copyright courtesy of the artists and Et al., San Francisco

Shadow boxing is the practice of sparring against an imaginary opponent. The body moves through a space with an opposition recognizing a mass behind absence. This act is to rejoice in self-occupance as movement, intention and impulse become dictated by the concoction of a phantom will. The subject casts a shadow upon itself

A push and pull between forces sometimes unknown, the politics of the everyday sustain a similar inertia. Bodies move and collide all while transporting an emotive energy that socializes generously. This energy has no bias and lacks distinction of light and darkness—good or evil.

What is laughable is when this space is perceived so selfishly—“I think therefore I am”. The shadow is an image, and what we shadow box needs no face. Before the mirror we can be anything and what we speak are someone else’s words. When we look the truth is flat. When we kiss our eyes are closed.

Et Al. is pleased to present The Order of Shadowboxing, a two-person exhibition featuring Alex Ito and Greg Ito.

Alex Ito’s work consists of a series of digitally printed portraits and a three-dimensional maquette. Each work displays an arid treatment that conceals the identities of each image. These non-identities of the figure and space suggest a malleability of an object and its potential to be manipulated by external force—continuing Ito’s investigation of corporately homogenized intimacy.

Greg Ito’s paintings and sculpture display an arrangement of images extracted from the visual culture of romance. The scattered placement of bodily gestures, objects and emotional states use the visual vocabulary from popular culture to explore pathos within such universalized and massively distributed imagery. Both illustrative and chaotic, Ito’s paintings explore the seduction of the romantic narrative.