MODA Curates 2022 - A. K. Burns' Negative Space

Corporeal Soil (2017) , a series of three bags of dirt strewn throughout the space, act as a new type of mapping within this exhibition. Hidden within these torso-shaped sculptures are wrappers referencing the candies of untitled works by the artist Félix González-Torres. Starting in the 1990’s González-Torres created a series of works in memoriam to those battling HIV and AIDS. The pieces consist of piles of candies wrapped in multicolored plastic stacked in a corner of a museum for visitors to take and consume at their choosing. The piles are maintained by the gallery or institution at a weight equal to that of the weight of various bodies during their affliction. His partner, Ross Laycock, was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988 and was the center of one of the most well-known of these series, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) . The candy pile in this work is maintained at 175 pounds, that of Ross’s own body weight. Working through time, grief, and consumption, this work troubles who in society is deemed disposable. In the exhibition at the Wallach Art Gallery, three works titled Corporeal Soil spill dirt onto gallery floors, detritus of Earth and body muddy the ground. The space isn’t clean, it is imbued with the stains of histories, the losses of lovers who would fail to make it into the canonical books of time. In addition, these bags evoke sand-bags used to weigh down tarps at construction sites or tie down a scrim curtain backstage in a theater. They metaphorically keep something in place—the labor of each bag, although invisible, is present. They are cartographers of loss in process, their presence become stains of how to read space. A.K. Burns’ Negative Space (NS) project generates new materiality through an SF ready-made system that itself is performative of these theories through inviting viewers to inhabit not only the space itself but the array of world- shaping perspectives that manifest that space. Foremost, it is a re-evaluation of the signs we use to represent and embody the world, and how those signs are embedded in hierarchies which lead us towards catastrophe. This can be seen as a semiological development as predicted by Roland Barthes in Elements of Semiology. He writes, “...that language is the domain of articulations, and the meaning is above all a cutting-out of shapes. It follows that the future task of semiology is far less to establish lexicons of objects than to rediscover the articulations which men impose on reality; looking into the distant and perhaps ideal future, we might say that semiology and taxonomy, although they are not yet born, are perhaps meant to be merged into a new science, arthrology, namely the science of appointment.” 13 This exhibition puts arthrology into practice by making a viewer perform the very joints of logic that SF theorizes. As co-curator of Mundos Alternos Joanna Szupinska identified, these intersections are themselves the leaking disruptions of impositions on reality. She writes, “A core strategy to specu-

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