www.cpworks.org

Spill

The writing and installation of Carrie Paterson and performance/video of David Khang are utterances of a crossbreed tribe. Both artists shape personae and experiences that feel like transgression, physically and psychologically troubled and bruising. Their work not only comments on the splintering of monolithic culture (or understanding of culture), but comes from a place of fracture. As when at the tower of Babel the edifice of a singular language is broken into small clusters of shared comprehension: patios, dialect, idiom - they suggest a radical new iteration of myths that have bound us to commonality. They live after the cataclysm, and in the resultant cacophony of voices probe with their bodies, with appendages, prostheses, and with storytelling the edges of spoken culture. Their subject is language and their tools are like themselves: hybrid, dissident.

Bleeding Book

In Khang's work, the ink that fixes language and fixes racial or cultural recognition dissipates lyrically into ether, melting to un-create the book, nihilo ex res, the nothing out of something. Can we ever rejoin the larger, abandoned community, and how to return? Another of his pieces suggests the circle may be closed by that closure is marked by conflict, blood, loss, and whatever is said about this completion, it must be articulated with another instrument of speech in the mouth.

Everywhere At Once and Not Just Once

The voices are familial in Paterson's blog, but made mythic; utterances occur inappropriately and rebelliously, spilling from bodies in the throes of metamorphosis. Her characters are male and female hybrids, but with the expected signifiers of gender sprouting in surprising places. Erections appear as insurrection. And for Paterson to use sex and new configurations of gender as means of rebellion reminds us that our bodies are dangerous, that we always create an other with the sexual act - in that we seek to recreate ourselves.

- Seph Rodney

Seph Rodney is a writer and artist who lives in Los Angeles, a transplant two times removed: initially the idyllic Island of Jamaica where he ran barefoot, then the precincts of the Boogie-down Bronx where he learned to lace up his sneakers.