Endless Care

Paul DeMuro

Steven Mayer

Andria Morales

Ian Pedigo

Sun You

Curated by Sheryl Oppenheim

Shortly after Olive Garden’s Endless Pasta Pass made its debut, offering seven weeks of unchecked pasta consumption for $99, an enormous Powerpoint created by a group of shareholders called Starboard Value LP made its rounds on the internet, in what amounted to a 235 page plea for care. The importance of care is evident, and yet the practice is often spotty, because to care requires a sincerity and conviction that resists half-hearted attempts or generalizations. We are at the surreal point where a hedge fund is demanding that the board of directors of a chain restaurant start to care.

In Jan Verwoert’s 2008 essay Exhaustion and Exuberance, he suggests the idea of care as a way to subvert the pressure to perform in a high-performance society—to “shatter the illusion of limitless potency” of the individual by acknowledging the debt of inspiration that we owe to other artists, friends, lovers, and histories. Verwoert writes, “To practice a politics of dedication and recognize an indebtedness to the other as the condition of your ability to perform means to acknowledge the importance of care. You perform because you care for someone or something. This care gives you the strength to act, not least because to not act is out of the question when someone or something you really care for or about requires that you should act.” Endless Care is based on the idea of care and its connection to indebtedness and specificity.

The curious fact of the constellations in the sky, the history of how some stars became part of the image of a warrior, some a scorpion, and some nothing, is the basis of Ian Pedigo’s sculptural drawings. Pedigo’s constellations are made of shoelaces tautly connected by sections of bone. The ability of early civilizations to give the abstract blanket of the night sky its own stories and images inspires the conviction with which found materials become a fitting vehicle for contemplation of the imagination.

Andria Morales’ sculptures stem from her interest in speaking of and examining the experience of the Other, a term that in her recent work has included immigrant and transgender communities. For this exhibition, in collaboration with Small Editions, Morales has made a zine that documents the transition of a childhood friend from female to male. In appearing next to her friend in each photograph, Morales prevents the work from becoming exploitative or objectifying him.

Steven Mayer and Paul DeMuro’s collaboration results from Mayer making a new work incorporating a drawing received from DeMuro. This work articulates the debt of creative potency most literally, as each artist anticipates and trusts what the other will provide. DeMuro’s work describes the separation of mind from body as many of our daily routines and social rituals migrate to the internet, and our online personae replace our physical selves as our main connection to the world. In Mayer’s work, the internet reaches back out of the screen to influence the physical world.

Sun You’s sculptures are dependent on the walls on which they hang, to the extent that they do not hang from the wall, but it is the wall that is penetrated by the sculpture. You’s work is made from surprisingly small and highly specific quantities; one sculpture is made of a paper clip, two fake eyelashes, seven pins, a bolt, three needles, and a nail. She exercises a restraint in opposition to the tendency to create work from indiscriminate quantities.