[NAME]

—OPENING RECEPTION—

Pedro Vizcaino: Mind Control
Saturday, September 30, 5–8pm
On view through November 4, 2023
Download free PDF of exhibition tabloid here

Qqq#chhhh!!!hhhh…qqq#chhhh!!!hhhh…qq#chhhh!!!hhhh…qqq#chhhh!!!hhhh…we told you once, obliquely, woven into the hiss and the crackling, that it was more than mere coincidence that Klansmen sometimes stitched their hoods out of the same canvas that abstraction’s splotches ended up on. Things cut from the same cloth, as they say. Only Phillip Guston picked up on it and chain-smoked his way into deciphering the darkness of the situation. We are back now…. qqq#chhhh!!!hhhh… qqq#chhhh!!!hhhh… beaming in though the static to tell you that painting in the world of algorithmic governance and interfacial relation, of data trawlers and ubiquitous surveillance, a world in which production leapt the factory wall and spread itself into every corner of life, the kind of world you are currently jammed up in, has to do with aliens. Not alien aliens, not bug-eyed grayheads, but the aliens the world makes of you. Emaciated strangers to yourselves. Mutants that don’t resemble, beyond the thin epidermal integument and the machinery of vital organs, the earthlings who once thought of things like horizons of emancipation or lives without masters; earthlings for whom becoming was not exhausted by becoming an influencer… qqq#chhhh!!!hhhh…qqq#chhhh!!!hhhh… Whatever you once had the option to be, strange and convoluted and code-busting, is off the table, deleted from the operating system. This will dawn on you slowly. It will be devastating. But you sense already that your habits and loves and friendships are drained of all that is complicated and contradictory in them. Only the patterns they compose, feed for engines of prediction, are left; patterns that are constantly pressed to become simpler and simpler, easier to correlate to neighboring patterns… qqq#chhhh!!!hhhh… qqq#chhhh!!!hhhh… And with the patterns, with their correlations, as more and more become possible, the Algorithm Leviathan weaves up-ahead you’s, future selves hard to call selves, that are an impoverished version of what you may have been. Yours will be—is—the lessness not of consummate negativity or militant refusal, but of thinly carved meat, of predicates that go missing in ever larger numbers… qqq#chhhh!!!hhhh… qqq#chhhh!!!hhhh… Algorithms blueprint future you’s as sadly obvious: flat aliens elated with their new 5-G phones; excited by their social media activism, the endless self-examination that an economy of allies requires; beholden to the injunction to narrate, following a maddening concentric drift, ever-thinner lives to no end—no end in the narrativizing about nothing, in parading purposelessness as exalted emotional melodrama, but also no political end that will affect the organization of the world in any consequential way. End of transmission…. qqq#chhhh!!!hhhh… qqq#chhhh!!!hhhh…

Pedro Vizcaino is a Miami based artist. He attended the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, Havana, where he graduated in 1981. He was a member of the Arte Calle group, an art collective based in Havana, from 1986 to 1988. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries in the U.S., Spain, Cuba, Mexico, and Poland and are part of the collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana; the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, Florida; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Florida. Pedro Vizcaino: Mind Control is made possible by Teiger Foundation.

free and open to the public
parking available along the front of building or in the back