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EVENT DESCRIPTION
There’s something punk about collages. Perhaps it’s the throwback to the do-it-yourself ethos of zine-making. Perhaps it’s the appropriation of images. Perhaps it’s the tapping into a shared mythology—ranging from the rhizomatic subcultrual niches to the lingua franca of pop culture. It is under this pretext that Square Street Gallery presents its first solo exhibition of cucurrucucu, work on paper.
In the art world, “works on paper” are often considered of secondary value—they are quite often works-in-progress, drafts, sketches, and studies that open into the artist’s inner workings but rarely considered to be masterpieces, an artist’s magnum opus. They are valued as documentation, which reveals the artistic process. But what if the entire production of an artist resulted solely in such works on paper? What if the practice’s point was to engage in a series of thought experiments that utilized the spectacularity of print culture, of the divine imprint that infinite reproduction has left on us?
The storefront gallery provides an opportunity for overlapping encounters; an intentional visitor who has traversed up the steps of Sheung Wan for a scheduled visit is just as likely to enter as a curious onlooker running errands abruptly seduced by the works on view, or a less interested pedestrian simply seeking shelter from the sweltering humidity. Not unlike stepping onto the train and being engulfed in bursts of body odors or sharing tables with strangers at a cha chaan teng, the storefront is a site wherein the public shares space and experiences.
This exhibition leans into the possibilities of these public encounters, which are historically negated in the cold, neutral spaces that present and house artworks. Seeking to address this inherent disjunctutre between the public and art, whether in relation to the public’s agency to make their mark upon an artwork or the accessibility of art spaces, cucurrucucu’s work on paper is a durational workshop that the artist and the gallery staff will facilitate for the entirety of the show. As such, the front room of the gallery is set up as a workspace to work on paper, to find images, to create assemblages, provoke multiple perspectives, and to—even for a brief moment—overlap and intersect with each other.
Empty frames that line the central wall will gradually be filled up by cut-outs from the artist and visitors alike until a completed collage emerges. These finished works will be added to a selection of cucurrucucu’s existing paper assemblages in the gallery’s second room on a recurring basis across the entire exhibition.
