Artists: Andrea Crespo, Santiago Leyba, Carlos Reyes, Chloe Seibert, Flannery Silva, Eric Veit, Andrew Norman Wilson
Exhibition title: The Pain Quotidian
Curated by: Nick Irvin
Venue: HQHQ Project Space, Portland, US
Date: January 9 – February 1, 2015
Photography: Worksighted, courtesy of HQHQ Project Space
Named for a specific Le Pain Quotidien in New York: a little hut on a traffic island at 14th Street, where one big avenue forks in two. It greets subway ride on their way to the Kiehl’s store, the Chelsea galleries, and the waterfront. On still winter days it emits the smells of its bread. Some smells float down to the new Whitney building, and others waft all the way up to the defunct women’s prison. But they all start at the Le Pain, where customers compact into a wool-lined wreath so that each may eat their daily bread.
Once, I saw THE ANGRIEST DOG IN THE WORLD here. He was splayed out, staring toward but not at the Le Pain. I know his work. “He does not eat, he does not sleep, he can barely growl … Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches a state of rigor mortis.” I didn’t approach him. The morning rush left him a perimeter as they came and went, and all the while he was as he had always been: seething.
That damn dog. What you can’t quite see in his comics, but which you can in the flesh, is that his stasis is so vibratory. It’s steaming off of him. He’s a vessel for a pain that’s not occasional but the insistent solute in which he steeps. He’s opaque, sure, but sometimes that’s right. Struck dumb so deep that the source can’t be spoken. And what we have left to grasp, then, are inscrutable signals leaking through a mute material valve.
In the show in Portland, one could expect:
A shell, a tea, an aluminum backpack, popcorn prints, trans-cinnamaldehyde (C9H8O), ballet barres, some linens and grommets, clipboards, DSM-V fan art, a smoke bomb fantasy, a curling match, a fabric lid and a concrete spill.
Eric Veit, Dice, Astragalus, Lemon Seed, 2014
Flannery Silva, My Barre #1, 2014
Carlos Reyes, Untitled (cinnamon tether #1), 2014
Andrew Norman Wilson, Chase ATM emitting blue smoke, Bank of America ATM emitting red smoke, TD Bank ATM emitting green smoke, 2014
Santiago Leyba, Living Wall 2, 2014
Chloe Seibert, Self Portrait, 2014
Eric Veit, Duration has the function of eliminating the unfit, 2015
Santiago Leyba, Anxious Plate, 2014
Santiago Leyba, Avoidant Plate, 2014
Santiago Leyba, No Swimming, 2014
Carlos Reyes, Untitled (cinnamon lung #2), 2014
Chloe Seibert, Concrete Expression #21, 2014
Flannery Silva, My Barre #2, 2014
Andrea Crespo
Flannery Silva, My Barre #3, 2014
Santiago Leyba, No Swimming, 2014
