Tuesday, November 22, 2016 at 7:30pm
Projective Life: Lucy Ives + Ken Okiishi
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
Presented with The Song Cave
Please join Light Industry for an evening of “readings,” broadly defined, including voice, video, and other projected images. Writer Lucy Ives will present her recent collection of dreams, aphorisms, games, and lists, The Hermit (The Song Cave, 2016), and artist Ken Okiishi will screen his 1999 video Death and the College Student.
Discovering the author adrift amid various image and information streams, preexisting texts and narratives, Ives and Okiishi’s work will make you see things. Foregrounding acts of attention, private thoughts, cherished puns and inside jokes, as well as the vivid strangeness of doing nothing at all, Ives and Okiishi enact visual experiences that may or may not be the stuff of photographs, drawings, video, and other still and moving images, traditionally defined. Here language is more than graphic—it is hallucinatory. Words and text rush ahead of pictures, entrancing the mind’s eye. Reading and writing flow through, interrupt, and multiply other forms of subjectivity, causing various kinds of imagistic distraction and divergence from what might otherwise be a singular “real” life. Visual logics lithely attach themselves to the everyday, rendering experience projective as much as remembered or lived.
Under these conditions, a film can act as a reading and reading may become a kind of film. Narrative moves not just forward and backward, but progresses by way of accretion, taking into account possibilities afforded by lateral movement, chance, and montage. The audience of “Projective Life” will experience a time of reading untethered from the sad exigencies of plot, in which images erupt, contract, slide, skip, cohere, and fall apart in real time, whether or not they are, strictly speaking, seeable.
Lucy Ives is the author of five books of poetry and prose, most recently The Hermit (The Song Cave, 2016). Her criticism has appeared in numerous publications, including Artforum, Lapham’s Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In summer 2017, Penguin Press will release her first full-length novel, Impossible Views of the World.
Ken Okiishi is an artist based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions at the Arbeiterkammer Wien; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Reena Spaulings, New York; Pilar Corrias, London; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Mathew, Berlin; Take Ninagawa, Tokyo; Mehringdamm 72, Berlin; Alex Zachary, New York. Recent group exhibitions at institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel; Serralves Museum, Porto; Arnolfini, Bristol; White Columns, NY; Frieze Projects, London; Artists Space, New York. His writing has appeared in Artforum, May, Bidoun, Triple Canopy, The Brooklyn Rail and a book on his work was recently published by Sternberg Press (The Very Quick of the Word, 2014). Recent screenings and performances at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Serpentine Gallery, London. Public collections include The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and The Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Tickets - $8, available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm.