Tracy Taylor Grubbs

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 New Show Features Artwork from the Deleuze & Guattari Reading Group 

 Where: Your Mood Gallery, Noonan Building, Pier 70, building 11, San Francisco, CA

When: Opening Reception: Friday, July 2, 2021, 5:00 to 8:00 pm

Website/Directions: www.yourmoodgallery.com

 Called one of the greatest works of postmodern philosophy, A Thousand Plateaus by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychotherapist Felix Guattari is a doorstop of a book that continues to resonate in 2021. Forty years after its original publication, the authors’ call to upend linear thinking, reconfigure conceptions of time, and act to rearrange the assemblage of our institutional and personal structures remains more relevant than ever. A Thousand Plateaus does not reflect the world so much as it takes the reader on a deep dive into the very process of change itself.

 For over a year, the five artists in this show met monthly to extend their rhizomatic muscles and puzzle through this seminal text together, first meeting at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland and then online as the pandemic raged last year. The result of their conversations and musings is Who Happened?, an art show at Your Mood Gallery in San Francisco. The show takes up the challenge of Deleuze scholar and translator Brian Massumi’s call to “lift a dynamism out of the book entirely, and incarnate it in a foreign media, whether it be painting or politics. . .”   

 What comes across in Who Happened? is not only the range of concepts but the many different ways the artists grappled with them. Philosophy is then not only knowledge but an event, something that happens to someone.

 The show includes works by artists Tracy Grubbs, Kathleen King, Niyant Krishnamurthi, Pablo Manga, Dan Nelson, and Selby Sohn. 

 Tracy Grubbs is a visual artist whose works examine the changing nature of form and the relationship of self and other.  Referencing Deleuze’s investigation of repetition, her blue line drawings serve as meditations on his phrase “Latitude is made up of intensive parts falling under a capacity, and longitude of extensive parts falling under a relation.” Her found handwriting pieces respond to the book’s insistence that the relative and the absolute can exist at the same time and that “the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.” 

 Kathleen King's assemblages, sculptures, and installations transform found materials through arrangement, questioning established hierarchies of value by linking materials, form, and structure with the precarity encountered in personal, social, and political contexts. She explores states of co-existence, contingency, and control, and draws attention to how we make our social environments and, in turn, are made by them. Her sculpture, Tears 3, combines the slowness of matter with the extreme speed of a line that has become entirely spiritual.

Dan Nelson is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician who plays with symbols, signals, and signifiers to explore how humans communicate and create meaning. His most well-known work is the conceptual coffee table book All Known Metal Bands, which was published by McSweeney’s. For this show Nelson offers Eyes Without a Face, literalizing a Deleuze and Guattari theme that thinks about dissolving and shapeshifting.

 Pablo Manga is an artist known for his abstract compositions using semi-transparent adhesive tape as a painting medium.  He has exhibited recently in shows at the de Young Museum, Root Division, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and Hang Art gallery, and currently has a solo show, Held Together, at Farm Projects.  For Who Happened? he includes a shimmering work of ostensibly clear tape envisioning a plane of immanence, and a work of colorful undulating striations referencing the idea of a plateau as a self-vibrating region of intensity.

  Niyant Krishnamurthi and Selby Sohn are a collaborative art team in the Bay Area that configure objects with personalities. Considering Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, TALKING BACK is a mirror that repeats back to you almost anything that you say to it. On the one hand, there is unity in the mirror's reflection and repetition. It is a tautology made possible. On the other hand, there are long gaps and silences when the mirror does not repeat what is expected, leading to an anexactness. There is mediation in the message—what is not controlled is experienced.