Proxetics

PRESS RELEASE: Peekaboo is fun for the protean, young or otherwise, because vantage is tricky. It’s certainly been the subject of treatises in both tactics and aesthetics. Isn’t every military history some story of the high ground? Art history, for its part, even has jargon for back-turned-to-the-viewer-subjectivity-shifts: Rückenfigur. Taking a bit from both, “goldfishing” is a gamer term for the practice of playing a mock match against an imaginary opponent who takes no action. Who is the metaphorical fish here, the person playing solitaire in the confines of their own room, or the absentee opponent, whose inactivity reflects minimal cognition? I’m told the expression originated with the latter, but the former rings more true. Anthropology draws a distinction between emic research, conducted within a group from the perspective of the subject, and etic field work, done from the outside. In 1963, Edward Hall selected the former to coin the term proxemics as a name for the study of nonverbal communication related to the spacing between people and, as an extension, their built environments. The globes in this exhibition try out some movements: turning towards and turning away, solos duos, ensembles. But a drawn figure, however enlivened, is not exactly embodied (it’s more plus less than that). For this work, the etic suffix may be closer to the mark.