Moment I | Ever— at Shimmer / Rotterdam, The Netherlands


Moment I | Ever—

Ruth Buchanan, Damon Zucconi, & Perfume Area

Curated by Eloise Sweetman and Jason Hendrik Hansma

10 February - June 2018

Shimmer
Level 2 Waalhaven Oostzijde 1
3087 BM Rotterdam, NL
















We present to you our first moment, of wavering and shifting endeavors. In MOMENT I | EVER— works by RUTH BUCHANAN, DAMON ZUCCONI, LAUREL SCHWULST & SYDNEY SHEN are brought together. At this moment we are broadly thinking about the lingering encounter and the anticipation that comes with it. We experience this with Ruth Buchanan’s chain curtain Staunch, IN and break, break, break (2018) that both simultaneously reveals, obscures, and slips from our fingers. Whereas, Serpentine (2016) by Damon Zucconi in collaboration with Laurel Schwulst and Sydney Shen is like the perfume it reviews, punctuating our senses with rapid bursts of text and sound. Laurel and Sydney are PERFUME AREA, an artistic project that tries to capture the high, mid, and low notes of fragrance in lyrical form. Their collection ‘Perfume Area’ (2015), published by Ambient Works, is presented here in the space. Damon’s print Eurphobia Milii (2018) is both indeterminate and thorny giving us the ability to be present and absent at the same time. Zucconi created a technique to ‘neutralize color perceptually by rotating portions of an image in contrasting 90-degree hue shift’. In doing, so the work changes intensity depending on what position our bodies’ take in front of it. Hovering above our shoulders as we work Ruth’s drawing Wavy line is drawn across the middle of the original plans (2016/2018) intersects the curtain, breaking its verticality. All the works in MOMENT I | EVER— shift and break ever-so-slightly the way we see.  

We are creating SHIMMER with studio mentality where knowledge arises through participation and experimentation. In this way, we hope the artworks and the multifaceted others gather and stretch across time. To do this, we are creating an expanded group exhibition that will be developed in dialogue with the artists where artworks fade in and out of sight in shifting rhythms.


ARTISTS

PERFUME AREA is the collaborative writing project between artists LAUREL SCHWULST and SYDNEY SHEN. Readings, exhibitions, and projects include Totokaelo (New York), FUME Parfums (Los Angeles), Soylent (Los Angeles), Kodomo w/ Damon Zucconi (New York), left gallery (Berlin), Beautiful Gallery (Chicago), WFMU (Jersey City), KCHUNG (Los Angeles), Printed Matter (New York). Perfume Area vol. 1 was published with Ambient Works (New York) in 2015.

DAMON ZUCCONI (US, 1985) was an artist in residence at the Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. He frequently uses custom software and scripts to create his works and has been engaged with the practice of computer programming since 2010, producing works which are typically accessible online. His works utilize vision, literacy and pattern recognition to make plain our perceptual experience. His work has been shown in Spazio Veda, Florence, IT, Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, NL, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, NL, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, NL, New Museum, New York, NY.

RUTH BUCHANAN (1980* Te Ati Awa/Taranaki) is a New Zealand artist living in Berlin. Buchanan’s work is primarily concerned with the various systems at play in the production of culture such as libraries, collections, and artistic practice itself. Her process often begins in the archive, where case studies, artefacts, or works by other artists act as departure points for an interrogation of art as a discourse of organizing, narrating, and problematising the world in which we live. The construction of the public moment is crucial and is viewed as strategically staging the parameters of encounter and the manifold power-structures that subsequently come into focus. She has realized commissions at, amongst others, Adam Art Gallery, Wellington; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Tate Modern, London; The Showroom, London; If I Can’t dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Amsterdam, the Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju and the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe.


ART WORKS:

RUTH BUCHANAN
TITLE: Staunch, IN and break, break, break
YEAR: 2018
MATERIAL: Chain curtaining with aluminum mounts

TITLE: Wavy line is drawn across the middle of the original plans
YEAR: 2016/2018
MATERIAL: Spray paint on wall

DAMON ZUCCONI
Eurphobia Milii
YEAR: 2018
Hahnemuhle photo rag

LAUREL SCHWULST, SYDNEY SHEN, & DAMON ZUCCONI
TITLE Serpentine
YEAR: 2016
MATERIAL: Video, 1 minute, text, synthetic voice
  
LAUREL SCHWULST & SYDNEY SHEN
TITLE: Perfume Area
YEAR: 2015
MATERIAL: Book published by Ambient Works

SHIMMER
TITLE: On The Waves With
MATERIAL: Online Mixtape Program 2018- ongoing
https://soundcloud.com/user-784731696


*All images copyright and courtesy of Shimmer