Reruns

Reruns Georgia Kaw, Lea Vajda, Sturtevant Reruns brings together three artists whose work embraces strategies of disguise and repetition, tension and relief, often achieving one through the other. They share a common interest in systems of organization and order, appropriating their governing principles and subverting or deconstructing them. Georgia Kaw’s paper wall sculptures, Hunch and Do Not Get On Or Off During The Closing (both 2024), exemplify such systems designed to contain without being containers themselves. Different forces—temporal, emotional, psychological— stretch, corrupt, or warp basic organizational logics by accelerating or deaccelerating their system of operation. Through such transgressions, the language of order is not altogether negated, but rather redefined as being inherently manifold, fragile, and temporary. The works become durational and non-hierarchical in that their structure of repetitive nodes and flaps allows for elements to be added or removed without the order itself having to adapt. Lea Vajda’s unknown IV (printersdevil) (2024) joins an ongoing series of print works that uses found image material to explore concepts of identity and masking through different strategies of portrait photography. Masks serve an abject role in that they effect the dissolution of a subject, acting as both tools for concealment and protection. The inherent ambiguity of the work is further reinforced by the uncertainty of the origin of the image. Embracing the slips and limits of image reproduction and printing methods, the artist creates glitches that break open the surface of the image and the illusion of the hidden subject. The Final Articulation of Origins (1999) and Shifting Mental Structures Millionaire / Money (2000) are part of Sturtevant’s first series of videos, which she began in 1998 when she was in her mid-70s. Lo-fi recordings of commercials, sportscasts, and game shows are montaged into nervous sequences. The repetitive razzle-dazzle of images and sound paints a dizzying portrait of turn-of-the- millennium consumer culture shaped by an increasing dominance of branding and an obsessive desire for immediacy and appearance.