Join A.K. Burns for the opening reception—and California premiere—of A SMEARY SPOT, Burns’s 53-minute, four-channel video installation, which will remain on view through mid-December.
This work constitutes the first in an ongoing five-part cycle titled NEGATIVE SPACE. The presentation at Human Resources is curated by Clara López Menéndez.
A.K. BURNS—A SMEARY SPOT, opening reception Tuesday, November 28, from 6 pm.
A SMEARY SPOT, November 28 through December 17.
HUMAN RESOURCES, 410 Cottage Home, Chinatown, Los Angeles.
*“A SMEARY SPOT was shot in two locations: in the deserts of southern Utah and inside a black box theater, where performers deliver recitations of appropriated and altered texts that compose a loose manifesto on being. Inside this cinematic experience is a surreal narrative of bodies in transition—bodies that change, move, slip between, act and act out. Among these bodies, the land, the water, the waste pile and the theater are not simply stages upon which actions occur, [but] sprawling protagonists.
“In a moment when the logic of political power seems unyielding, this work presents an aesthetic vision—a speculative space that unbinds us from delusional inherited behaviors, where the present categories of body, mind, land, ‘one’ and ‘other’ are dispersed in favor of a new relationality. Through moving image and an elaborate (6-channel) sound track, A SMEARY SPOT allows us to inhabit this metaphysical offering, decisively rethinking our conception of language and boundaries (political, social, bodily) and their ensuing impact in contemporary understandings of politics.”
A.K. Burns, A Smeary Spot, Part One of Negative Space (2012–ongoing).
