carrick bell and Rocco Ruglio-Misurell: The End of Living
February 18 - March 19, 2023
Tiger Strikes Asteroid
1206 Maple Avenue, 5th floor, #523, Los Angeles CA 90015
Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles is pleased
to present The End of Living, a two-person exhibition of new work by
carrick bell and Rocco Ruglio-Misurell. Consisting of video and sound
installation (bell) and sculpture, installation, and drawing (Ruglio-Misurell),
The End of Living sketches out proposals for scavenging pleasure, hope,
and connection in a long apocalyptic now with no guarantee of a future in
sight.
This exhibition is the second part of an
exchange between artist-run spaces in Berlin and Los Angeles; in 2022, bell
& Ruglio-Misurell hosted an exhibition of work from the member artists of
TSALA in their Berlin-based non-profit space, Horse & Pony.
The End of Living takes its name from an inversion of New Queer
Cinema filmmaker Gregg Araki’s first
feature-length film, The Living End. Shot on a minuscule budget with few
resources and fewer permits, Araki’s film took the
crisis of a specific community (in this case, the AIDS epidemic at a particular
moment in the early 1990s) and spun it into a broader generational existential
crisis. Flavored with a strong dose of premillennialist doom, the film asks how
we can continue living in a world that is clearly in its death throes.
Following two HIV-positive men on a Bonnie and Clyde tour of the American West,
The Living End writes a new mythology for how sex, ethics, friendship,
and subcultural resistance can be sustained in a world whose centers of meaning
and coherence have been fractured and sold off.
bell’s new video and sound installation directly
engages the source material The Living End, consisting of a multi-screen
video installation mounted to a wrought iron fence installed in front of the
gallery’s windows. The video installation samples,
distorts, and re-edits key fragments from The Living End that amplify
and elaborate moments of physical and erotic (dis)connection, the repetition
and abstraction of found visual material proposing that, rather than seeking to
escape where we find ourselves, we would do best to dig in and find our way
through.
Rocco Ruglio-Misurell presents new works
created from used clothing, combined with tinted acrylic and epoxy resins.
Spills, leaks, and organic shapes are captured in thin sheets of mesh
fiberglass, which utilize transparency and result in double-sided paintings. In
addition to the paintings, presented in the corner of the gallery is an
installation made of used jeans that were once worn by both him and his partner
carrick bell - the panels of the pants are cut out, leaving the hems as traces
of the body. Braided denim is connected with cast flowers resembling anuses.
Ruglio-Misurell acknowledges the short life span of garments by including
labels of the fast fashion items in each work. These works don’t offer easy answers to how to escape the
disasters our generations have inherited, but they do have some propositions
for how we can enjoy ourselves and each other as we try to repair.
Bios
Rocco Ruglio-Misurell is a Berlin-based artist with
a BFA from The Art Institute of Boston and an MFA from The School of the Art
Institute of Chicago and was born in Newark, NJ. In 2009, Ruglio-Misurell
received a Fulbright Fellowship to Berlin. Exhibitions include a solo show at
Dzialdov in Berlin (2022), Jak zapomnieć in Kraków (2019), a two-person show at
KH7artspace in Aarhus, Denmark(2018), a solo show at the Helen Day Art Center
in Stowe, VT (2017), and a two-person show at LVL3 in Chicago (2016). Past
residencies include OxBow (2019), Mass Moca (2017), The Wassaic Project (2017),
Vermont Studio Center (2016), Skowhegan (2011), and Ox-Bow (2008).
Along with carrick bell, Ruglio-Misurell is the co-director of Horse
& Pony, an artist-run studio and non-profit exhibition space with the aim of
providing artists, curators, and other project spaces the opportunity to extend
or act outside of their existing practices.
carrick bell is a Berlin-based video
artist and PhD researcher at Chelsea College of Arts. Bell received their MFA
from SAIC in 2008, and a BA from Hampshire College in 2004. They have taught at
Northwestern University and delivered lectures for the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Residencies include Vermont Studio Center
Fellowship Residency (2018); Crosstown Arts, Memphis (2018); NARS Foundation
(2017); the Wassaic Project (2016) and Ox-Bow (2009). They have exhibited at
KH7artspace (Aarhus), Chelsea College (London), Beverly’s New York, Kunsthalle
Exnergasse (Vienna) Charim Gallery (Vienna), LW56 (Vienna), .hbc (Berlin),
Brooklyn Pavillion of the Shanghai Biennial, and BAM (Brooklyn Academy of
Music). They have received stipends for artistic research (Berlin, 2021) and
project space programming (Berlin, 2022). They are the co-founder and
co-director of Berlin-based artist-run space Horse & Pony, and founder and
programmer of Xanadu, a space for artists’ moving image work.