Where 4: Constraint
with Jeremy Couillard, Brock Enright, Siebren Versteeg, and Sophia Le Fraga
March - October 2014
During the final weeks of March 2014, Jeremy Couillard’s spinning painting, When Appropriate, Use Metaphors That Represent Concrete, Familiar Ideas, twirled silently in our closed and locked shipping container, only visible to the public via live-stream on our web site.
When Appropriate… was the first installment of Where 4, a group show celebrating constraint that was staggered across March, April, and May. Couillard created When Appropriate… under the overt constraints entailed by a commissioned artwork. We asked him to make one of his motor-powered, rotating circular paintings, but with added parameters for a specific point of reference: the spinning color-wheel on a frozen computer monitor. When viewed through our webcam, Couillard’s work appears roughly the size, speed, and colors of the dreaded “beach ball.” When Appropriate… will be displayed in in the interim between future exhibitions, heralding wait times and the promise of future activity.
Following Couillard’s presentation, Brock Enright conducted a series of one-on-one instructional encounters inside the Where shipping container. Enright has been called a “kidnapping artist” and is the director of V.A.S., a company he founded in 2002 that orchestrates elaborate “reality adventures” for its clients. Each visitor was locked in the shipping container alone with Enright for about an hour. The fourteen experiments were offered gratis over two days in April, on the condition that the participants signed a liability waiver and selected a set of limiting conditions to which Enright would adhere.
In May we displayed Puff Puff Pass, Siebren Versteeg’s exhibition of algorithmic paintings generated in the shipping container during a single week in May. Demonstrating the sprawling possibilities unlocked by finite rules, Puff Puff Pass tethered Versteeg’s computer program directly to Snoop Dogg’s Instagram posts. Each post triggered a new painting in an expanding compendium of printed canvases.
The exhibition concluded on Sunday, October 26 at CAGE, when we revealed the findings of these experiments in an eponymous publication. This book acknowledges the historical anchor of Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians who embraced constraint-based aesthetics and rule-based production. Where 4 features the poetry of Sophia Le Fraga, who hosted a reading at the book launch with Lanny Jordan Jackson and Alejandro Justino Miguel Crawford.
