Pickleman and TSA_PDF x SVA

Crossbred in Unholy Matrimony

April 3, 2021 - April 30, 2022

“I'm not Mr. Lebowski, you're Mr. Lebowski. I am The Dude, so that's what you call me, you know? That or, uh, Duder or His Dudeness or El Duderino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing.”

—The Dude from the film The Big Lebowski

Office Space is excited to present a provocative and sometimes polarizing group show which combines elements from the Jason Pickleman art collection associated with the Chicago art gallery Lawrence & Clark with artworks featured from the winter 2021 edition of the TSA_PDF collision with the online The Artist Residency program of The School of Visual Arts. Apart from the Pickleman objets d’art, other participants include the following extras: Albert Abdul-Barr Wang, Raquel Adler, Carol Chediak, Maceo Eagle, Clee Ferris, Britt Harrison, Leah Koransky, Linda Marcus, Lu Mazen, Sara Minsky, JP Morrison Lans, Olga Rabetskaya, Shereen Shalhoub, and Carol Updergrave. Here is a little story that you got to tell:

On February 3, 2021 at 2:53 PM Mountain Standard Time, conceptual artist Albert Abdul-Barr Wang decided to send this message out:

Hello there Jason,

How are you doing? I appreciate your receptive feedback. My thoughts were not to do a traditional guest/collection type of exhibition approach where a portion of a collection is lent out to another place/institution to re-display. I was thinking about something much more post-postmodern than that.

As I recall you have a Lawrence and Clark monograph which I hope to procure. I was thinking about an exhibition of your collection through vicarious means like exhibiting the pages from that catalog as the show itself.

or

Maybe if you are interested, perhaps we could exhibit color photographs of the work from the collection itself. So instead of the objects themselves showing photographic reproductions of the work. This will allow the viewers to reflect on their second-hand experience through art. It's like a postmodern way of reflecting on the art of seeing art. Also how art is a product and folks can extrapolate the aspects of art as a sociological and cultural product.

I know that perhaps that may be far-out but I am working on unique exhibitions which focus on the ideas comprising art practice and also back to the phenomenology of how people look/cope with art.

I appreciate your thoughts and would like to see what you think about my perhaps all too crazy ideas?

sincerely, Albert

With a firm surprise, Pickleman responded favorably and sent over some of the Lawrence & Clark historiography in 11” x 17” color laser offset prints of choice artworks to our gallery space.

TSA_PDF was started in April 2020 by Los Angeles based artist, curator, and gallerist Alex Paik as a method to engage the COVID-19 era art audience with innovative artworks as the shutdown of galleries happened in rapid succession. According to their premise, these PDF documents represent a “series of printable exhibitions curated by Tiger Strikes Asteroid. People are invited to download and print these works on their home printers and share their ‘install shots,’ which we will share on social media and our website. We view these exhibitions as a fun, experimental way to bring something physical and meaningful into people’s homes as they socially distance.”

The curators at Office Space decided to perform a complex physical remix of both sets of printed-out exhibitions at the Office Space Chettinad back room location as a postmodern response to the viewer’s phenomenology as self-reflection upon the act of looking at art. According to an Artsy article (https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-long-people-spend-art-museums), the average time spent looking at a single painting is 27.2 seconds. Even though one could argue that this is very short for the duration of looking at artwork, the surfeit of art particularly in museum retrospective or group shows lends this perspective heavily to this statistic.

Thus an idea was born. This group show Crossbred in Unholy Matrimony is the summation of a deliberately confounding and frustrating sequence which slows down the gallery viewer into a glacial pace. Instead of sparseness, the observer gets heavy density of the archive. An office desk chair is placed in front of the installation to allow only one person to interact with the works at a time. The archive of artworks which are mere placeholders for the actual art wherever those may be becomes the elaborate encyclopedia of the simulacra. Often art audiences interact with art as virtual representations mostly in auction catalogues, monographs, art magazines, the Internet, NFT’s, and PowerPoint slides. By denying the audience at Office Space the original artworks which are capitalistic objects of desire, this exhibitions acts an institutional critique for forcing the viewers to interact with their preconceived notions of how our people in late stage capitalism consume art often without much thought.

Jason Pickleman, who is an inspirational figure, is a profoundly cutting-edge Chicago gallerist who interacted with his gallery in an artistic and avant-garde fashion. As Lawrence & Clark behaved as this friendly yet highly conceptual place from 2015-2020 for showing a conceptually based art collection, the gallerist often played around with the collection with innovative, intriguing, and off-kilter ways. Office Space has become the resurrected ghost of this gallery in a new manifestation in the Salt Lake City where this new oasis of conceptually driven artworks have found a new home. This group show then becomes a Lazarus for the new era of playfulness within the unorthodox exhibition space.

Why crossbreed? The Pickleman and the SVA_PDF collections behave as unusual harbingers for how relatively unknown artists are able to interact with a wider public. Curation becomes a heavy task for drawing often unwilling folks into uncomfortable spaces and the Office Space team hopes to have more people around the Utah area examine this newly forged visual sacrilege. Why unholy matrimony? The curators decided to place the image of Linda Marcus’ Strained depicting well-hung bare breasts into the interjected frame of the Mormon white privileged portrait of Christ olging a female subject. By combining nudity with religious figuration, the act of looking/ogling at Christ flirting with a female now becomes the act of voyeurism. Pervert as art audience??? What is the meaning of a private viewing as a lap dance with the artwork?

May the Gods strike OFFICE SPACE down for this blasphemous REMIX! The gallery would not be remiss to mention this force majeure.

Pickleman is the moniker of Lawrence & Clark which was (or is) Chicago's most experimental collector-run art space from 2015 to 2020. Jason Pickleman is the gallerist and collector in question. TSA_PDF x SVA: The Artist Residency Project (Winter) is an interaction between Tiger Strikes Asteroid galleries founded in 2009 and the members of the SVA artist residents from the winter 2021 group. The list of participants include the following: Albert Abdul-Barr Wang, Raquel Adler, Carol Chediak, Maceo Eagle, Clee Ferris, Britt Harrison, Leah Koransky, Linda Marcus, Lu Mazen, Sara Minsky, JP Morrison Lans, Olga Rabetskaya, Shereen Shalhoub, and Carol Updergrave.