Plymouth Rock

01/09/2020

01/09/2020

i hate you

06/07/2020

Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography) Exhibit

MEL BOCHNER, and responses by

MOHAMED ALMUSIBLI
GIULIA ESSYAD
MAXWELL GRAHAM
MARSH GREEN
DORIS GUO
HARDY HILL
BRADLEY KRONZ
ADAM MARTIN
ELLA MATHYS
PUPPIES PUPPIES (JADE KURIKI OLIVO)

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Mel Bochner’s Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography) (1967-70) consists of nine offset prints on note cards containing handwritten quotations from famous thinkers about the nature of photography. A third of these quotes were fabricated by the artist and, in the age of the internet, it remains unclear which. A tenth card reproduces a work from an earlier series, Actual Size(1968), as an impossible Polaroid negative. Contradictory statements, loss of meaning and questioned authenticity compound across the cards. Published by Multiples Inc. as part of Artists & Photographs, the work is a prescient and continuously relevant mediation on the subjectivity of the photographic image and documented thought.
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“Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography) Exhibit” brings together this Bochner work and ten photographic responses to the individual cards. Printed and hung as physical snapshots, the exhibition creates a feed of further translations during a time where content sharing of image and knowledge appears encompassing. The request made of these artists by Plymouth Rock mimics the constant request for disposable digital content by many institutions over the past few months. By transferring these ideas into the physical realm of an exhibition we question the throwaway treatment of creative thought and insist on considered, in person interactions.
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Bochner’s Misunderstandings stands out as a seminal work about the contradictions and subjectivities of not just photography, but of understanding and society and life. I am grateful for the consideration and time that Mohamed, Giulia, Maxwell, Marsh, Doris, Hardy, Brad, Adam, Ella and Jade took during these times to participate.

I look forward to sharing this exhibition and these artists’ interpretations and reactions with you safely in person, and later, in the spirit of contradiction, digitally on our website.
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Health, life and cheers,
Mitchell

10/03/2020

Tobias Kaspar's 6th Valentine's Special

February 20 - March 21

21/01/2020

Lisa Jo: Marriage Story

Lisa Jo’s practice tempts the laws of aesthetics and legibility, walking a fine line on the rim of abyss. Each progressive step made in her paintings and installations demands a thinner tightrope, tempting images to fall apart or collapse within. Her success against both explains the constant compositional activity of all. Each element erases another. Images are built up from cancellations, the annulled narratives leaving the pictorial behind. Jo plays games and war games with abstraction and figuration; classical modernism and the forever now; harmony and conflict. Here, jealous rivals orbit one another as eternal neighbors. How Jo carefully manages the precarious relationships between these varied strands of present and past and the remnants of our visual culture is important. She is a mediator and instigator. Cultural commentator and clear consumer. In her work, fragmentation is harmonic, binaries compete, but one sided relationships echo through space. There is an enchanted tension.

22/11/2019

Real Madrid: Bacco Malato

Sickness as an entity, as transmission from one to another: a communal experience, infects the work of Real Madrid. It effects time. Slowing it, ending it or focusing towards excitement and preservation. Caravaggio was ill in his youth, soon after arriving to Rome from the North as these two recently have. His first task was to paint himself as a jaundiced god of pleasure, now watching over the Villa Borghese with his sallow eyes and toned biceps. He recovered, but his world stayed dark. Our world burns on the sides and melts on the tops. We are sickness and infectant and the packages of what we enjoy will haunt us forever: floating in our waters, entering the bodies we consume. This is all wrong. We are failing them, but they are starting to understand our betrayal. The leaves of the great forests fall for nothing and the toxic surrounds us and shelters. We’ve all tasted desire and it will suffice, the world ending in both: fire and ice.

14/09/2019

"The apparent difference in their attitude hides a surprising amount of similarity. They are obsessed by ideas of beauty. They collect in the service of their aspirations for something better than ugly, normal reality."

Nodelman, Perry. "John Fowles's Variations in "The Collector"." Contemporary Literature 28, no. 3 (1987): 332-46.

"In my opinion a lot of people who may seem happy now would do what I did or similar things if they had the money and the time."

Fowles, John, 1963, The Collector, London, Jonathan Cape: 24.

04/09/2019

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/10/trippelganger.php

Thanks so much Linda Jensen for sending this over!!

19/08/2019

19/08/2019

Der Kreis was a gay men's magazine published in Zurich between 1943 and 1967. With essays on the political situation of the gay community, poetry, drawings, short stories and soft core photography (Karlheinz Weinberger and Herbert List published anonymously or under coded names); it was a nexus of a certain type of gay thought and communal desire throughout Europe in the mid-century. For the past couple years Samuel Haitz has used the archive of Der Kreis in aspects of his work as a vocabulary that reveals desire and form in an oblique idea of collage. Sifting through these issues Haitz found echoes of his own longings in a visual language that felt contemporary or timeless: a fascination with the past feeling sexually relevant, rather than nostalgic. The images grabbed here: nudes, swimmers, dreamers; are attractive by consensus- only of the kind found in the temples of the Classics - those bodies that homophobic Western society tolerates appreciation of. Some are etched on aluminum panels so that we may never glimpse them in totality, the reflected light adding aura as it denies a visual demanded. Others are simple black and white copies, the full magazine layout intact, arranged along one another, creating compositional plays of line, shadow, torso, back and ass. Pinned and stacked under high-UV lighting these totems fade while enjoyed, in a compositional relation to these bodies now withered by time. Alongside this all are parts of an ongoing series of paired unopened soda cans that continue Haitz’s riff on the legacy of gay desire in art: here Frank O’Hara’s Having a Coke With You and Jasper Johns’ Two Beer Cans, both from 1960, are brought unified to the present. Within all the pieces is an obsessive interest in the male body gazed, whether in private or through targeted advertising that wets the tongue and quenches the thirst. As Haitz reanimates these men, he reanimates desire- fleeting and Frankensteinian as it is. It is summertime and taut muscles reverberate in the pool, the park and the construction site; if not the mirror. We have our wants met or unmet but visually we drink it up, and we all have our dreams for August and after.

15/07/2019

curated with Wyatt Kahn

11/04/2019

April 5 - May 25

Mohamed Almusibli and Lili Reynaud-Dewar researched and collaborated on the Zurich iteration of Reynaud-Dewar’s My Epidemic seminar planned to occur this past January at Zollikerstrasse 249. My Epidemic was to explore the impact that the AIDS epidemic has had on individual bodies and social cultures through a series of readings and active discussions. The content exhibited relates to this weekend long project which didn’t take place.

11/04/2019

January 26 - March 29

Lorenza Longhi raids society for its deceptive structures, codes and verses. This supposedly neutral plunder is remixed and duplicated, highlighting and complicating its primary form. Her work deals with the reproduction, but at a level that exposes its labor, craft and the worker’s hand. The modular USM Haller home and office furniture system of 1963 is an icon of mid-century design and aspirational luxury. It has been endlessly noted for its ability to morph and expand between the arenas of working and private life with an unbiased visual cool. It is both Swiss and neutral. The sculptures in this exhibition clone a classic of this system. On inspection they are brazenly unique, non-modular and defy the desire to find use in them beyond the cultural. There are esoteric power dynamics at play here, a rejection of the increasing tendency towards the 24-hour-a-day home/office office/home, a questioning of standardized good taste and a reminder that nothing can be nonpartisan. At Plymouth Rock, a cast-off space meant as a near windowless office, they demand to be seen as both pure sculpture and binary referent in their natural habitat. The ability to view these works is slippery as their existence flickers around their perceived nature and the truth of understood existence. Longhi speeds us into a rendered world on the other side of the uncanny valley, forcing a questioning of more than the artisanal art object. What is reality here, the simulacrum or the impression of the mass produced lie? Who is in control when the fraud is faked?

28/02/2019

Plymouth Rock turns 5 today! ### - Mitchell

14/01/2019

For the past two decades Alex McQuilkin has explored dichotomous oppositions in the ways images and stories interact in media and society. In these works the cinematic competes against the authentic and human longing fights implied critique. The idea of mediated appearance, how we view ourselves and others, how we want to be viewed, what we are taught to understand and be attracted towards is tackled and reflected back towards the audience. Along the way, McQuilkin presses into notions of gender, class and race in alternatingly subtle and aggressive ways. Taken together the works on view prophetically intervene in a variety of the narcissistic definitions of our Western condition in the early 21st century. Her exploration of mediated imageries is an exploration of a standard universal - image obsession, projection of self and a societal consensus of what appearances and actions are forced to be.

16/11/2018

October - November

Five artists were invited to contribute a readymade, an item manufactured and readily available in similar form across broad globalized locales. These five objects were all purchased in Zurich and are exhibited without title, medium and date. The artists in this exhibition are internationally exhibiting, from a variety of origination and generation. Each has agreed not to discuss their involvement in this project and does not know the identity of the other four artists. The works presented are free from any personal reading traditionally associated with these artists’ larger practices and remain works for the duration of the exhibition.

06/10/2018