Ended Feb 21
Codes For Conduct
Jan 22 – Feb 21, 2016
Essex Olivares
Madeline Hollander + Alexandra Lerman
Pakui Hardware
Naomi Elena Ramirez
Nurture Art is pleased to announce Codes for Conduct, featuring new commissions and site-specific installations, curated by Lindsey Berfond and Jocelyn Edens.
Codes for Conduct stages controlled and unrehearsed interactions between the body and digital tools. Contemporary technologies produce particular movements— the swipe, the scroll, the full-body interaction with a device. These gestures, or organized forms of movement that respond to an interface, are new embodied habits.
An interface enables communication and supports tasks. In Codes for Conduct, interfaces include screens, apps, walls, scents, sounds, protocols, lesson plans, and the exhibition itself. An interface coerces movements into habits and constrains routines; it extends the capacity of the human body.
If the interface helps us realize the body’s limit and its augmented potential, it also mediates a fluid recalibration of gendered, raced, aged, placed, and abled bodies. As organic flesh and artificial device become fully integrated, and as the device transforms to seamlessly adapt to the body, what new blueprints for living and learning should we generate?
Essex Olivares’s self-help app Incorporate allows users to perform the task of self-reflection and activate new routines. Madeline Hollander + Alexandra Lerman’s video sculpture scrolls through a brainstorm of collected references that transfer rather than discard and end where we begin. Pakui Hardware coerces social routines, metabolisms, and cravings with a repurposed portable ballet barre. And Naomi Elena Ramirez’s video and photographic scores isolate, re-choreograph, and recuperate the vernacular of smartphone gestures.
Handout design by ITWST.
Lindsey Berfond is currently a Curatorial Assistant at Art in General and Guest Co-Curator of the Queens International 2016 at the Queens Museum.
Jocelyn Edens is the Kress Curatorial Fellow at Hampshire College.
Special thanks from Nurture Art to the Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Foundation for a generous donation in support of this exhibition.
