I've Only Known My Own

Opening, Friday, April, 21_6 pm to 8 pm

I’ve Only Known My Own is a group exhibition that explores how the materiality of the body is represented through measurements, process, and documentation. In many ways, the performance-based works included in this project reference and respond to the legacies of feminist and conceptual art. They reflect upon how the matter of the body might act as a force that generates its own (il/logical) systems, and how this material embodiment might function as a form of resistance. I’ve Only Known My Own also considers how the material body might intersect with new technologies, be altered or amplified through various modes of communication, take on forms of mediated presence, and activate questions around the presentation and dissemination of ephemera.

I've Only Known My Own: Performance of Nadège Grebmeier Forget

Life Session

Nelson Henricks installation takes its title from Falcon Film #615, Life Session (1977). Falcon Entertainment – also known as Falcon Studios – is based in San Francisco, California. Founded by the entrepreneur Chuck Holmes in 1971, Falcon Studios is one of the world’s largest producers of gay pornography. By the early 1980s, it had distinguished itself as a frontrunner at a time when distributing pornography was a criminal offence. Holmes was active in supporting politics at a local and national level, even helping to finance Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in the 1990s.

Book of Nineteen Nocturnes

An inveterate night-owl and somewhat of a loner, Jim Holyoak works like a prowling cat: in tune with the shadows, his muffled movements hardly breaking the star-lit silence. In his wake, one usually finds formidable mural frescos bustling with curious life forms, suspended between terrestrial deep time and imagined future configurations rising from the ferment of life’s potentialities. His pictorial universe translates a fascinating empathy for all forms of life—extinct, current, and imagined—and a willingness to plumb their inherent strangeness. Holyoak inhabits an tremulous, evolving, hetero-chronic world that he renders for us in sensitive gestures of India-ink, graphite, and watercolour. If his mural installations sometimes derive from collaborative work, his constant production of sketches drawn from life reflects a rather hidden dimension of his sensory world. His sketches document his perambulations in the wilds of Northern Europe, China, Canada, and testify to an existential solitude imbuing these contemplative travels. At OPTICA, the accumulated drawings form the substratum of an epic narrative in nineteen chapters presented in the form of a mysterious archive.

In partnership with OPTICA, artist Edith Brunette will undertake a documentation and art intervention project during the coming year in which she attempts to bring the worlds of art and multimedia closer together. This project falls in line with the artist’s ongoing focus on the economy of the art milieu.