Exhibition on view: 10/20 - 11/18/2018
Opening : 10/20/2018, 1-5pm
Venue: FOGSTAND @ St. Paul, MN, USA

Claire Kayser, USA
My work exposes the relationships formed between expectation and the objects associated with routine. I investigate the role that emotional attachment plays in our daily interactions with objects and their assigned conventions. Routine in this context applies to human behavior, the personal rituals we perform in order to feel socially comfortable. Through exploration of familiar forms and their functionalities, I maintain specific context, while introducing newly created forms and meaning. My process of making through repetition, manipulation, and covering directly relates to the compulsive ritualistic up-keep I attribute with my forms. By drawing attention to current obsession, I acknowledge my own compulsions and affairs within object and ritual.

Zachary Betts, USA
I make objects that pull from a visual and physical vocabulary that I consider “familiar.”Familiarity is about proximity, nearness often rendering the closest objects the most invisible. In spite of their invisibility, they become the containers that get filled with fragments of memory, emotion and place; they ground us in a space and a time. Familiarity becomes a more complicated, often uncomfortable feeling as these objects begin to turn away from functional and material expectations, leaving a rift between the thing known and the thing seen.

FOGSTAND is happy to announce WHERE YOU GO I GO TOO, an exhibition that is the result of a collaborative residency, hosting Eau-Claire based artist Claire Kayser and Twin Cities based artist Zachary Betts. As the curator, and seeing as the gallery is in my backyard (garage), I have been spending more time observing the developing exhibition after the artists are both away from the space. So the following summarizing statement is less qualified by asking or probing the intentions of artists directly, but, instead, through observing the ever shifting, hybridizing and decomposing materials within the gallery. Dowsing these intermittent objects and interrupted processes, it seems that both artists have as the heart of their artistic practices, notions of metabolism, nutrient (re)/(up)cycling and the sometimes accidental, other times intentional phenomena of self-cannibalism (autosarcophagy) within the experimental metabolization of readymade objects.

dB Drag Racing is an excellent example of an autosacrophic tendency undergone in the name of experimentation, one where modifications to a car are so extreme that most dB Drag cars can no longer be driven more than a few yards, let alone be entered without risk of injury by dangerous sound pressure levels (SPL). Even the final test of the car’s transformation (ultimate sound system) is called a “burp”, an unintentional pun to the fact it has consumed everything that went to make it a car (steering wheels, car seats, mirrors, and drivers).

Together, these artworks, outstripping their authors’ non-material intentions, are left to invite the viewer to witness the figurative becoming a figure —with depreciating accuracy— left only to attest to the act of (dis)(re)figuration.

︎︎︎ 漢