All you know I know

Lower East Side Printshop is pleased to present All you know I know  with guest curator Nicole Kaack. The exhibition includes new works by Bill Abdale, Sasha Brodsky, James Cuebas, Mark Gens, Elizabeth Harney, Hidenori Ishii, Kate Liebman, and Beth Livensperger. It will be on view on the Printshop’s website from February 24 – April 12, 2021.

All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you’ve held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute.

– Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany

In the first pages of his 1975 American dystopic novel Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany pronounces the hardships and minor dramas of city life in a tired litany that hollows the reader with its familiar, inevitable rhythm. His opening line serves as a harsh reminder that even experience is not unique: “All you know I know.” The works in this exhibition tap that inexorable pulse, thematizing an industrial and post-industrial theory of cyclic time—as contained within a day, a routine, an architecture, or an object.

Bill Abdale, Mark Gens, Elizabeth Harney, Kate Liebman, and Beth Livensperger address the material seriality of their environments, cultures, and media. Bill Abdale’s hazy compositions tower with warehouses and new developments, which obscure the nighttime haze like the sudden arrival of the horizon. In the repetition of chimney-stacks or the grid-like face of an apartment-building, Abdale’s photographic screenprints capture the modular repetition of the city sprawl. Beth Livensperger’s Lateral Moves echoes this iterative logic in a throng of silkscreened waiting room chairs and light fixtures, which uncannily extend the space in which they are installed. Like the crowding legs of Livensperger’s chairs, Elizabeth Harney’s collagraphs—saturated with sticky browns that blossom into magenta—double and triple hands and bodies. The equine anatomies of her hybrid figures gesture to the mechanical labor of the army marine who can only follow commands, not issue them. James Cuebas’s photo silkscreen Dino on the Avenue captures a playful scene from the experience economy, as the Sinclair Oil Corporation dinosaur balloon makes its stately progress through the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. By contrast, Mark Gens draws relations between contemporary and older forms of industry in a composition that collides varying levels of focus and zoom. In Gens’s Threshold #6, the skeleton of a ten-story building stands beside the enlarged armet from a historical suit of armor. Finally, in a surprising moment of stillness, Kate Liebman’s meticulous etching of the cragged lunar surface suggests a clear icon for our participation in recurrent cosmic cycles.

The cadence of this onslaught is importantly broken by Sasha Brodsky, James Cuebas, and Hidenori Ishii, whose works gesture toward narratives that in their intimacy, improvisational responsiveness, or urgency exceed the surreal echo chamber of an urban landscape. Brodsky’s etched still life of his apartment window and portrait of a denizen of his Brooklyn neighborhood attempt to preserve the character of life in present-day Brooklyn, and serve also as a reminder of those who can’t or won’t live within the circularity of capitalist time. Likewise, Cuebas’s Climate Change Protest suggests a path towards collectively striking a new rhythm within that of the city. In his series of Green Bill Board, Hidenori Ishii screenprints abstract shapes drawn from paper currency onto acrylic sheets taken from New York’s many construction scaffolds. While some of Ishii’s prints become final works, others are inserted as new scaffold windows into the urban landscape, participating in interventions enacted by street artists. Like Abdale and Livensperger, Ishii critically highlights the serial quality of structures from architecture to paper money, however, also demonstrates how minor interventions can reconstruct the city to significant effect.

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About the curator:

Nicole Kaack is an independent curator and writer. Kaack’s writing has been published by Whitehot Magazine, artcritical, Art Viewer, SFAQ / NYAQ / AQ, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Sound American, and BOMB. She has also contributed texts to I will set a stage for you (HOLOHOLO, 2019), Recto / Verso (Hauser & Wirth, 2018), and has edited collections including Twelve Month CRUSH (HESSE FLATOW, 2020). Kaack has organized exhibitions and programs at Small Editions, the Re: Art Show, CRUSH CURATORIAL, NURTUREart, Assembly Room, The Kitchen, Hunter College, A.I.R. Gallery, and HESSE FLATOW. Kaack’s projects include of missing out, prompt:, and Not Nothing.

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Lower East Side Printshop’s programs have been supported in part by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Private supporters have included: Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Jerome Foundation, New York Community Trust, and PECO Foundation.

We thank our volunteers, friends, members, and patrons for their dedication, support, and generosity.