DENSITY BETRAYS US at The Hole - Guest Curators Interview

Density Betrays Us - group exhibition at NYC’s The Hole gallery in Tribeca

The recent group exhibition Density Betrays Us at NYC’s The Hole Gallery Tribeca location developed out of a 2020 article by Andrew Woolbright in Whitehot Magazine, “Phantom Body: Weightless Bodies, Avatars, and the End of Skin.” This theme and many of the artists exhibited began with thinking about the body in the digital age. Seeing artworks that treat the skin like a computer “skin” questions our ideas about corporeality and weight, or even gravitas.

These issues and the way the works were selected and presented are explored in detail in this group interview with the three guest curators of the exhibition (Andrew Woolbright, Angela Dufresne, and Melissa Ragona).

Interview by Tyler Nesler

Density Betrays Us was developed out of an April 2020 article in Whitehot Magazine by Andrew Woolbright titled “Phantom Body: Weightless Bodies, Avatars, and the End of Skin.” Andrew, what was the origin for the development of this group show? Did the idea germinate with you as you worked on the article, or was it suggested by someone else? Angela and Melissa, how did you both become involved?

Andrew Woolbright: The article really came out of studio visits and conversations. I started to sense a pattern among younger painters dealing with the body. We had all been taught this lineage of impasto and flesh; going back to Rembrandt and Soutine and proceeding through Bacon, Freud, and Saville; that we were all breaking from. There was a different criteria emerging in thinking of skin and its depiction, something post-Freud, and ultimately more about how virtuality was affecting visuality, embodiment, and presence.

I didn’t write the article with the intention of it becoming a show (and would have written it differently if I had known), but instead wrote it to try to identify a community of artists, specifically painters, who were trying to advance the depicted body into different spaces, that had this relationship to virtuality, avatars, and persona. There was some urgency to it with so much zombie figuration; artists moving backwards to very resolved theories of the body that approach it through the gaze or beauty standards.

Fortunately, others saw a need for it to become a show. Vacancy Gallery in Shanghai has been incredibly supportive and reached out about doing a show based on the article. When I was reaching out to artists, Angela Dufresne suggested we do the show in New York as well, and had a ton of ideas about curation, so it just made sense to co-curate it. She also said “we need Ragona” and so Melissa came on and helped make the show even more dimensional. We were really excited that The Hole let us do the show, and thankful to Caitlin Cherry for suggesting it to them. It’s been a really great experience.

Angela Dufresne: I loved the article and reached out to Andrew to thank him for including my work in it. Long story short, we started mulling over spaces to curate a show together in NYC around its themes. I’d been forming an exhibition for a while called “wood” which had similar ideas that would synthesize technologies, around mannerist or baroque distortion and dissonant surfaces that both protect by also camouflaging or counter resembling the flesh below — “wood” was a more pointedly ecological premise — I liked Andrew’s premise better basically, for various reasons, but mainly because we got this to include eco-feminist ideas and expand beyond the notions of nature more adeptly with his framework. Inevitably many of the artists that I was going to include in the original show are in Density Betrays Us. Andrew and I are colleagues — a few years back he’d been a student in the graduate program where I teach at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Our working relationship and exchanges started at RISD — but are even more robust today. There are no banal conversations with Andrew — he really lives in and around these ideas 24/7, and thus he’s wonderful to be with. It seemed way more expansive — potent even — to work together than laterally. Collaboration is key to the kind of deconstruction of the “individual” I think we're all committed to.

Melissa Ragona: At first Angela and Andrew were working together on this — with Andrew’s essay as a focal point for the show. Then, Angela sent me Andrew’s essay and asked if I would be interested in being part of the project. Excited by the ideas Andrew outlined in his essay — ideas of a new weightlessness, the disappearance of painterly skin, the focus on phantom limbs — I jumped in, head first. However, I was less interested in “hollow” or “phantom” bodies as forms, and more engaged in debates that circled around ideas of affect and post-humanism. Not in terms of abandoning the body, but trying to think about what it means that the body has always been represented by a discrete “figure” — rather than the more abstract, ephemeral effects of a body moving in social, psychic, and non-Euclidean space. To borrow from Gilles Deleuze (one of the main philosophical frames pulsing in this exhibition), affect, unlike an “idea,” is non-representational, it is the moving, driving “force of existing.”

Concretized in the works in the show, it is the electrical currents that stream across the painting by Angela Dufresne, or the pattern-making and emergent camouflage that hovers over and in-between the bodies/figures in the work of Caitlin Cherry, Didier William, Carl D’Alvia, Carol Rama and Joiri Minaya. It is very much about intensities, about ensembles of relations, about differences colliding and producing — often amplified through the effects of technologies — new configurations of social and cultural fabric. Indeed, this sounds utopian, but across the works and how they interface with one another — is a recognition that all affect is not chosen or produced freely. Social movement, force, and impact are determined through material, lived experience. This tension was also exemplified by our own thorny love and respect for one another’s sometimes vastly different positions in these debates. Thus, the process of curating wasn’t always easy — indeed, this exhibition is the product of months and months of intelligent, often heated strife. But, I loved — and continue to value — the curatorial vision of such compelling, provocative forces.

From left to right: Melissa Ragona, Angela Dufresne, and Andrew Woolbright

Caitlin Cherry, “Rainroad,” 2021, Oil on canvas, 57.5 x 58 inches, 146 x 147 cm

Didier William, “Koupe tet, Boule Kay,” 2021, Acrylic, oil, ink, wood carving on canvas, 70 x 52 inches, 178 x 132 cm

Carol Rama, “Untitled (Tongues 18)”, 1996, Magic marker on paper, framed, 12.5 x 41.5 inches, 32 x 105 cm

The show examines how “the body, specifically its canonical depiction as flesh, is being re-imagined in post-humanist terms.” For all three of you, what were your specific considerations when choosing artists for this exhibit in the context of this examination? How did you all then work together to come up with a consensus for a criteria of selection that best utilized both individual preferences and also remained true to the overall theme?

AD: Through discussion, argument and laughter — that is how consensus was attempted! I think we all agree, and feel passionate that the centering of the human in the extractive system of euro-centric capitalist exchange is ruining the lives of most humans, animals, plants and fish on the planet — not to mention “non-living Matter”. And we're all very interested in how artists are evolving ideas and inventing aesthetics to craft other modes of “representation” for what being human is in a more integrated system of forces we’ve ineptly come to call “ecosystems.” I think for the first time in my life across the board artists are actually daring to present living solutions — utopic strategies for our dire circumstances — rather than waving the critical wand at the existing systems like mansplainers. They are looking for other ways — this happened in the 20th century — i.e. social realism, the muralist traditions of central and south America — even the Futurists, for better or worse. I think the fatigue around western philosophy’s critique is total because of its ineffectual attempts at staying the progress of neo-liberalism — across the board. Of course Black Indigenous and Diasporic artists have been doing this all along — and certainly many queer artists, myself included I hope.

Anyway, these solutions are richly informed by science, political histories, ecofeminism and post-humanism, or what Donna Haraway calls “transhumanism”. For me, the model presented by many of these artists for the human is of the slippery agent that can traverse and dodge the gaze of the Capitalscene. Unlike the previous Utopia models these artists have no nationalist, market-based or institutional allegiances. They understand the politics of what they do can't be held by such rusty machinery.

AW: I was looking for ambiguity. Work that had too much to say about virtual space in the positive or negative got left out. I think we were looking for work that had a blend of old world/new world sensibilities and contradictions. Across all of the artists we wanted to make sure we didn’t end up with too much of any one ideology — too much aspiration, too much irony, too much utopic futurism, too much present-tense nihilism. It was trying to find a survey of artists who used bodies in different ways of testing knowledge. Also all of the work is anti-Cartesian, and none of the artists see a dualism between mind and body but instead understand reality as an instantaneous experience of both.

MR: At least one important, united vision was that we all wanted to push to take the exhibition beyond painting. We wanted to include sculpture, installation, video and, if we had had enough time, space, and resources we would have included actual, LIVE performance. I was especially interested in some kind of interactive media installation, thus Peggy Ahwesh’s recent work (at first, we had thought of just including her earlier video work) utilizes a 4K 360-degree video camera to shoot scenes as disparate as her driving over the Rip Van Winkle bridge in the Hudson Valley, to her traversing the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, to her visiting various indoor and outdoor sites in the contested site of the West Bank. But, for our exhibition, she focused on images both on the bridge and deep in the Hudson Valley forest. Usually used as an immersive technology, i.e. to deliver 3D experiences for corporate users, Ahwesh’s use of this technology distorts our sense of both gravity and density (and thus, any kind of normative immersion). Often, she focuses on her own body as it stretches across split screens or her head as it is suddenly sucked up in the vortex of the 360 stitch (the point that brings the two 180-degree views into one surround-vision plane). It’s also the one work you can actually “touch” — since it utilizes touch-screens as a way of viewing the work — viewers are encouraged to customize their vision, viewing scenes from unimaginable POVs as they somersault across bodies, bridges, rivers, and mountain ridges. We were also interested in work that conflated equivalences between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, visual and non-visual experiences — thus work like Ahwesh’s helped to confuse these boundaries and even re-evaluate how we might experience a “visual work” in a non-visual, haptic mode.

Many of the works explored such equivalences, such as Terrance James Jr.'s seemingly eternally morphing heads, made out of an amalgam of Elmer’s glue, Expanded Polystyrene (EPS), PVC tubing, steel and Sumi Ink. One work is called “Phlegm” (2020), the other “Protogenesis” (2019-2020). They both reference an array of interrelated concepts — both human and non-human — related to ideas from biology, alchemy, the occult, science fiction and geology. Protogenesis points to the process of how rich mineral matter is produced organically, which James couples with origin stories of “blackness.”

Peggy Ahwesh, “Rip Van Winkle”, 2020, 4k, 360 degree video, Edition of 3 with 2AP

Terrance James, “Phlegm”, 2020. PVA Glue, expanded polystrene (EPS) head, PVS tubing, steel, sumi ink, dye, Head: 10 x 7 x 8 inches, 25 x 18 x 20 cm, Steel base: 24 x 3.5 x 3.5 inches, 61 x 9 cm

Terrance James, “Protogenesis”, 2019-2020. PVA Glue, Expanded Polystrene (EPS) Head, PU and PVS tubing, steel, Sumi ink, dye, acrylic, Head: 15 x 9 x 7 inches, 38 x 23 x 18 cm, Steel base: 24 x 3.5 x 3.5 inches, 61 x 9 x 9 cm

The title Density Betrays Us is interesting and telling on many levels. For each of you, what is the meaning of “density” here, what is “betrayal,” and who does “us” ultimately refer to?

MR: The process of finding a title for this show was tumultuous — we engaged in ongoing text exchanges and several in-person brainstorming sessions in which we generated several hundred exhibition titles over the course of many months. We read theoretical texts together — and passed club propaganda about our particular titles and why they were the best for the show back and forth. We ran titles by friends, colleagues and, most importantly, several artists in the exhibition. We suffered through break-downs in communication, we dug our heels in, we got stubborn, we changed our directions several times, and tortured each other until we finally reached consensus.

Density Betrays Us is both a mash-up of ideas and phrases parsed from the work of Frederic Jameson, Jacques Derrida, and Sara Ahmed, as well as a monstrous-collage from our own heads. We still wanted to acknowledge Andrew’s original impulse in his essay — thus wanted to point toward the idea of “phantom bodies,” but also wanted to push beyond the idea of the production of phantoms toward notions of the haptic and affective, again, the effects (of technology, of viewing, of experiencing), rather than simply the forms produced by kinetic and virtual processes across various media. But, we also didn’t want to be catapulted back to the early throes of deconstruction — albeit Derrida radicalized Marx’s materialism by bringing in the notion of the specter which so effectively haunted and questioned the static idea of presence (or material density). As Jameson so cogently argued, spectrality encouraged us to “not count on its density” because indeed, at every turn, it was ready to betray us.* And, I do not think it is any accident that this title came screaming forward toward us during one of the most politically traumatic and pandemic-laden times in current history. It wasn’t the surface we had to be afraid of after all, it was the air itself that threatened to betray us — our invisible adversary** (a charged, inscrutable density).

*Frederic Jameson, “Marx's Purloined Letter,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinkler (New York: Verso, 2008), pp. 26–67 (39).

**A nod here to Valie Export’s video, Invisible Adversaries (Austria, 1976)

AD: Density is a fully-formed human that has extracted itself as separate from the other forces that allowed it to exist — i.e. microbes, light, vegetable and animal proteins, air, water, but also code, screens, texts, images, culture…that density betrays us because it’s built around the premise of autonomy, which is beyond a doubt, absurd.

AW: I think of Zygmunt Bauman’s use of the word liquid, and how solid structures broadly are being challenged. There’s also Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of the reason for art, which is that it creates precarity; specifically it shows how fragile the delineations are between ideologies and perceived boundaries. When art is focused on a boundary, it is towards the effort of creating confusion and ambiguity. Density to me implies an ideology, which Althusser says makes part of reality invisible to us, the parts that don’t adhere to our belief. Density and solidity betray our attempts at utopic configurations and collectivist action.

With the wide array of artists represented in this show, who were some of the most surprising discoveries for each one of you, in the sense of a particularly unique or idiosyncratic approach to depictions of a “post-human” idea of the body and mind transcending the corporeal?

AW: Angela brought up including Duane Slick. The two of them taught me at RISD. I love his work, but his inclusion in the show wasn’t immediately recognizable to me, other than that I really believe in his practice. Duane is a member of the Meskwaki nation, and the coyote is a spirit animal of the Meskwaki that appeared to him in a dream ten years ago. His inclusion gave the show what it needed — to take the body out of virtual space, and explore it in the context of egregores and spirits. The fear of this show was always in presenting avatars and personas as “new” within contemporary art or fashionable — instead we’ve been trying to point to a community of artists who are interested in thought-form bodies of extension, as sites of practice, performance, and study. It was brilliant to include him on Angela’s part and I can’t think of the show without him in it.

AD: When Andrew and I first started talking about a show I immediately said we would be wise to expand the ideas as a philosophical framework that exists across any disciplinary frameworks, rather than have it be about painting per se. I immediately brought up Peggy Ahwesh as someone who needed to be on our list. Thinking beyond aesthetic disciplines is essential to our thinking as we evolved the show and its future iterations.

Duane Slick, “The Clarifying Question,” 2018, Acrylic on panel, 14 x 11 inches, 36 x 28 cm

All three of you are artists and two of you (Andrew and Angela) have works in the show. In what ways do you each think your own work addresses the particular themes of the exhibition? How long have you been exploring these ideas, and what attracts you to this exploration of the ways in which the body transcends its traditional limitations?

AD: I have been dealing with these issues since I started making work — as a young queer in Kansas in the 80s I felt the weight of binary i.e. Nature-man, rational-irrational, man-woman — thinking and its suppressive/repressive destructive. Not just as limiting to my own self expression both sexually and aesthetically, but also as barriers for empathy across cultures and life forms and the material forces that make up this planet we live on. It just seemed stupid for me. Since the early 90s my subjects have refused the naming as nether man nor nature, form or formless, but allow for both to coexist in their lack of selfhood and their openness to absorb, fuse with, metabolize the world around them. I’ve sought to articulate non-paranoid ways of being in the world, chimeric cross species, combining in many of the works is an example.

AW: I’m interested in the moment that things can become a body; bodies as anagrams; and how our identity and existence are shaped by broken signifiers and missing links of information. The bodies I depict are merging and made up of other bodies. I’m interested in marbling bodies together, and what that conceptually might mean; and trying to make Kafka swarms of contingent non-individual figurations, that are also magnetized and picking up advertisements and images along the way. I believe individual experience is important, but we are in a place politically and environmentally that doesn’t make room for any individual to be the subject of a portrait. I’m more interested in collective entanglement, both inter and intra relationships between human/non-human/object/and idea.

MR: In 2013, I wrote an essay entitled: “SUPERCLEAN: The Violence of Theory in Contemporary Art” which, in many ways, set me on the path to exploring the kinds of questions we have posed in this exhibition.* The central question for me back then was: What happens to theories built around analog ideas about the body, desire, pleasure when they come into contact with new technologies? One approach was to examine images and objects in contemporary art that dealt with debates around abjection and disgust in conjunction with a seeming opposing corollary: what I called, the superclean. The latter, I argued, was a trope that exploited the capacity of certain technologies to present hygienic forms of representational violence at the level of the digitally manipulated image: “The superclean takes the aesthetic of disgust as its object, but washes it thoroughly through the use of new technologies. By scrubbing away the blood, chocolate, mother’s milk, and other abject materials so often used in 1970s performance art using pixel washes, game modifications and integration into clean products, artists are reimagining the shape and form of what was once called, desire.”

I was looking at the slick performances of Christian Jankowski, the video-game inspired, staged kidnappings of Brock Enright, and the sterilized violence of Brody Condon’s gaming projects (others included Jason Salavon, Martin Wattenberg, Kara Walker & Ellen Gallagher). I was interested in the tension between embodiment and disembodiment; and faciality and facelessness that many of these artists seemed to place at the center of their work. In the same way, I see some of the work in this current exhibition — I observed that there was a distinct failure of the strategies of conventional representation to translate the processes of production that new technologies, as well as more recent theories of difference suggested. As I mentioned above, I find the current work of Terrance James Jr. and Caitlin Cherry, directly addressing similar slippages across representational modes — Cherry uses ideas culled from aurora and moiré patterns, using iridescence to explore intersections of gender and race, as well as what it means “to fetishize a screen” (or body).** Whereas, James explains that he is trying to create “speculative entities” that defy the “laws of our known universe.”*** This is precisely the kind of dirty, transgressive phenomenology embedded in their superclean surfaces, exemplifying the provocative energy lurking beneath the patina of many works in this exhibition.

*Melissa Ragona, “SUPERCLEAN: The Violence of Theory in Contemporary Art,” The Beauty of Theory: On the Aesthetics and Affect Economy of Theories (Berlin, Germany: Brill/Wilhelm Fink, 2013), pp 215-228.

**Caitlin Cherry, “Interview: Caitlin Cherry on Digital Abstraction and Black Femininity,” ArtForum (July 20, 2020)

***Terrance James Jr., “Artist Statement,” unpublished, July 2021.

Angela Dufresne, “No Longer the Hazardous Forest,” 2018, 84 inches x 132 inches, 213 x 225 cm

Andrew Woolbright, “Digital Medieval Tenderness (Untergang simping for e-bois and e-girls)”, 2021, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 54 x 72 inches, 137 x 183 cm

With an exhibit of this scale there must have been significant challenges in figuring out how to present the wide array of works within The Hole’s Tribeca gallery space. What was your input as a group in the exhibit’s setup? Were the works arranged in any kind of specific subcategories that might impact the way a visitor experiences the exhibit, or even in a manner that may help to guide a visitor through it?

AW: We discussed everything together. I made a sketchup model of the space so we could accurately have an idea of how work would relate to each other. You never completely know until all of the work is in the physical space though. We were really happy with the right wall in the second room capturing this idea of a rubberized or plastic body, and three radically different uses of it across the work of Sun Yitian, Michael Jones McKean, and Emma Stern. We were also really happy with the moment of pattern and enmeshing in the second room, between the works of Didier William, Angela, Caitlin Cherry, and Joiri Minaya in the back room. There are a lot of layers to the show, but putting Caitlin, Angela, and Didier together in the same room was personally really exciting for me. I think they are the best living colorists and really pushing painting into the spaces it needs to go.

MR: As Andrew states, we rigorously discussed everything together long before we actually placed the works in The Hole’s 86 Walker street gallery in Tribeca. So, indeed we had a 3-D rendering of the entire exhibition all set, months in advance. But, then, when we actually were in the space, the real work began — the week before the show opened. We were like: wow, this work actually cannot be here, next to that one — either because it dwarfed it or the concepts or forms were not allowing the other one to breathe, to expand. We also wanted to kind of choreograph a rhythm or way of moving through the space that was dictated by the gestural force of the works. Especially in the first room — we valued how Geoffrey Chadsey’s work (“Goat Twister 1 & 2,” 2021) kind of electrified the left wall with its Yoko Ono upside down streaks of black hair jetting toward the ceiling. We wanted you to feel the jolt of this strong, graphic work, the minute you walked in the door.

On the other hand, there was also this simultaneous welcoming gesture created by the arms that moved from Katherine Olschbaur’s “The Ecstasy of St. Katherine” (2021) to Claudia Bitran’s “Be Drunk” (2020) to Chris Coy’s “Wilma’s Rainbow 1” (2016) — indeed, we wanted the momentum of these works to invite the viewer in — whether they felt vigorously pulled or as if they were floating on vapor (again this tension was interesting to us). And we liked how this brought the viewer hovering around the more ephemeral work of Yasue Maetake’s “Lineal Fetishism I” (2020) and Duane Slick’s “Metaphysical Effect” (2018) — both works evoking a kind of post-apocalyptic dream-scape in which organic matter (animals, flora, fauna) seems to rule over or be in some kind of new symbiotic relationship with technologies (in Slick’s case — that of simulated studio light in the creation of shadowed layers, in Maetake’s, the remnants of industrial hardware).

Since Andrew already speaks to the powerful relationships of work that is featured in the middle or second room, I just want to talk briefly about our struggle in terms of presenting video works in the face of having very little wall space to spare after the show’s paintings were exhibited. Since film and video work is often relegated to the basement in many exhibitions — I wanted to fight to have at least two of the works above board, in the main rooms of the exhibitions. Indeed, because of space limitations, we had to install several very important, stellar video works on the basement level, such as Nicole Miller's “The Borrowers” (2014), William E. Morris's “What Have you Been Doing” (2020) and Michael Robinson's “Onward Lossless Follows” (2017), we were able to feature Claudia Bitran and Peggy Ahwesh’s video installations on the first floor. Ahwesh’s placement in the center of the back wall of the exhibition was important — since we wanted to give viewers plenty of space to interact with its tactility, as I mentioned above, viewers could touch both screens, moving themselves through the varied scapes of each work. We moved works around quite radically in that back room, since we wanted everything to breathe and speak to one another — a relationship that I am particularly proud of is how Jingze Du’s “Brad” (2021) speaks in interesting ways, as a video-screen like print to Ahwesh’s 360 moving image work – the latter kind of transferring a kinetic charge to the Brad Pitt’s otherwise static gaze. Likewise, I feel that Carl D’Alvia’s and Casja Von Zeipel’s sculptures also feel mediated, as if they are in movement next to Ahwesh’s installation.

First room of exhibition, with works including (from left to right) Claudia Bitran’s “Be Drunk,” (TV screen) Geoffrey Chadsey’s “Goat Twister 1 & 2,” (middle wall) and Chris Coy’s “Wilma’s Rainbow 1” (right wall)

Second room of exhibition

Michael Jones McKean’s “15 Families, 2015/2021” (left) and Emma Stern’s “Heather”

Back room of exhibition, with works including Carl D’Alvia’s “Fortunato", (left) Peggy Ahwesh’s video installations (center), and Cajsa Von Zeipel’s “Friends of Grapefruit” (right)

To experience a virtual 3D tour of Density Betrays Us in addition to viewing many more photos of the show, visit The Hole’s gallery exhibition page

Additional links:

Andrew Woolbright’s site and Instagram

Angela Dufresne’s site and Instagram

Melissa Ragona’s Instagram

Tyler Nesler is a New York City-based freelance writer and the Founder and Managing Editor of INTERLOCUTOR Magazine.