One and Three Quarters of an Inch

Curated by Peter Clough

The Former Convent at St. Cecilia's Parish
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
2010

One and Three Quarters of an Inch, curated by Peter Clough at the Former Convent at St. Cecilia’s Parish in Greenpoint, is a 56-artist group show presented in total darkness, offered up by way of flashlight. The flashlight beam is like a video camera, theatricalizing the act of seeking intentionality amidst the ghosts of a haunted structure. The darkness, the smells, the mingling sounds of architecture and installation emphasize the sensual experience of seeing—of encountering. The directional optics essential to visual experience thwart the impulse toward knowledge in the round. We see only from our own point of view. Moving in the dark, flashlight in hand, we fall back into our bodies as the line between ourselves and what we see becomes manifest. It is a mobile proscenium. Reflected back, from a halo of light, a beam of perception, objects-as-facts expand and transform: moments to meanings, desperation to desire, dispatches into darkness.

One and Three Quarters of an Inch engages modes of communication that involve the simple statement of fact without description or referent, without explanation. What happens to communication between subjects when meaning is either (1) so commonly agreed upon that any stated fact can be understood without speaking about its implication, or (2) so complicated and fragmented that attempting to specify meaning becomes impossible? Perhaps, mired in an abyss of either too much or too little communal knowledge, we fall back on a last resort: the unexplained utterance of fact. The artists here evoke the normal, diminutive, comprehensible, and embodied facts of objects, deployed to seek out meanings that are of yet intangible or unspeakable. All images copyright and courtesy of the artists.

One and Three Quarters of an Inch was reviewed by Lynn Maliszewski for White Hot Magazine. Read the review here.