Cesar & Lois: Fruiting Plato (2019), from series, Thinking like a Mushroom (2019-present)
Texts and Soundings:
The Image Talks Back
Curated by Jenny Wu
With works by Cesar & Lois, Jessica Bremehr, Ryan Erickson, Sierra Faust, Masimba Hwati, James Parker, and Allison Parrish
April 15 - May 20, 2022
Opening Reception: Friday, April 15
NARS Main Gallery
Footsteps announce the arrival of a friend or stranger without revealing a name or face. A word references an image while pointing behind its back at another. Information passed from tongue to tongue emerges distorted, anew.
Texts and Soundings: The Image Talks Back dwells and delights in this zone of instability. Here, seven artists and collectives probe the ways in which reality is constructed by language and conjured by voice.
Jenny Wu is a fiction writer and arts worker based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her writing, which explores East Asian history and identity through an experimental feminist lens, has received generous support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the Louis B. Sudler Prize in the Arts, and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Her literary and art criticism has been featured in publications such as Asymptote, BOMB, and Harp & Altar. Texts and Soundings: The Image Talks Back is her first independently curated art exhibition.
About the artists:
Cesar & Lois layers fungal and human intelligences. The art collective includes Lucy HG Solomon (California) and Cesar Baio (Brazil). Lucy HG Solomon is an associate professor at California State University San Marcos, where she leads the DaTA Lab. Cesar Baio is an associate professor of Art and Technology at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) and the director of ACTlab. Cesar & Lois received the 2018 Lumen Prize in AI and were selected for Singapore’s Global Digital Art Prize biennial in 2019, the Aesthetica Prize Future Now anthology in 2021 and the Mercosul Biennial in Brazil in 2022.
Jessica Bremehr is a visual artist working in St.Louis, Missouri. Through sculpture, painting and installation, she offers an escape into fantastical realms where themes of environmentalism, gender, and science fiction intersect. She received her MFA in Visual Arts from Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St.Louis in 2021.
James Parker is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes sound, performance, sculpture, music, photography, and public projects. His work playfully engages with nostalgia and memory, and often invites participants to take part in the creation of new works. James’ work has been performed internationally at various festivals, conferences and showcases including the Navy Saxophone Symposium and the Cohen New Works Festival. He has been a fellow at Can Serrat artists residency in El Bruc, Spain, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, an ASCAP Fellow at the So Percussion Summer Institute, and is Co-Director of Tetractys New Music.
Sierra Faust is a Kansas City based artist and writer. She received her bachelor’s degree in Sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2018. Her drawings appropriate and map text onto physical space through the act of hand copying. The text in the work is sourced from postmodern writers like Richard Brautigan and Don Delillo, and post-punk music like Wire and Gang of Four. This body of work is particularly influenced by Jack Spicer’s The Holy Grail. The grail quest is a fitting metaphor for how copying acts as a fixation with its goal a myth in itself.
Ryan Erickson is an interdisciplinary artist whose work destabilizes and ultimately questions how language, methodologies, and social institutions function. Erickson received his MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis and his BA in Visual Art & Design from the University of Northern Colorado. Recently, his work has been on view at Trestle gallery, New York, Rojo gallery, San Antonio, and Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis. Erickson has served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cambodia from 2015-2017 and is a recipient of the 2021 John T. Milliken Foreign Travel MFA Award.
Masimba Hwati was born in 1982, two years after Zimbabwe’s political independence from Colonial Britain. This is the year Juluka released “Scatterlings of Africa,” a hit song appeasing colonial fantasies and celebrating enigmatic Africa and flawed ethnic equality against the backdrop of Apartheid in South Africa. The following year, 1983, the new black Zimbabwean government unleashed “Gukurahundi,” the ethnic cleansing genocide on the southern part of the country. This is also the year Michael Jackson released “Human Nature.” Hwati is preoccupied with sound, micro-politics, sculpture, and performance and has created projects in Harare, Detroit, Johannesburg, Capetown, South Carolina, Nova Scotia, and Weimar.
Allison Parrish is a computer programmer, poet, and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet. She is an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Allison was named "Best Maker of Poetry Bots" by the Village Voice in 2016, and her zine of computer-generated poems called "Compasses" received an honorary mention in the 2021 Prix Ars Electronica. Allison is the co-creator of the board game Rewordable (Clarkson Potter, 2017) and author of several books, including @Everyword: The Book (Instar, 2015) and Articulations (Counterpath, 2018). Her poetry has recently appeared in BOMB Magazine and Strange Horizons. Allison is originally from West Bountiful, Utah and currently lives in Brooklyn.
