YALE UNION

Sometimes, when birds make sounds, it feels like the sounds are coming out of me

An exhibition guest curated by home school, featuring the artists Aria Dean, Jiří Kovanda, K.R.M. Mooney, and Bri Williams.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the format of this exhibition has been adjusted to ensure the health and safety of all involved. Instead of a physical exhibition, the curators will present a series of online events via Yale Union’s TWITCH channel (see right). Please stay tuned for announcements for future digital programming from home school both in relation and not in relation to the new, morphed context of the exhibition.

A free publication will be available featuring writing by the artists, an essay by co-curator manuel arturo abreu, and poetry by invited writer Brandon Drew Holmes.

–

There is an intuitive link between mimicking a natural sound, composing a melody, and uttering a complete sentence.

Feelings are interference patterns from other possible universes. The way making a decision forecloses possibility is like how the resonant frequencies of the room’s architecture express themselves in our voices.

Language is the Big Other. A perfect tool for making Big Sense (experience) portable—Sense into sense (meaning, use). Being human means carrying abstraction in the heart’s pocket.

Abstraction is thinking at scale. It causes cognitive vertigo. Berardi speaks of the crisis of inarticulation caused by the complexity of things when thought at higher scales. “The inability to find sense is first of all the inability to create it.”

If we go back early enough, humans are inventing words as they use them, vessels of the spectral, in a way that resonates with an idea of two halves of the self meeting, finally.

In the reverse pietà, we see the Christ cradling the dead Virgin mother. Every Thing has a secret language which is also its double. If harmony is the trees, negative harmony is the roots, vast underfoot and cabal.

Sometimes, when birds make sounds, it feels like the sounds are coming out of me.

—manuel arturo abreu

Aria Dean (b. 1993) is an artist, writer and curator based in New York and Los Angeles. She is Editor and Curator at Rhizome. Dean’s writing has been featured in Texte zur Kunst, e-flux, Artforum, Art in America, Kaleidoscope, Spike Magazine, and other publications. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include (meta)models or how i got my groove back, Chapter NY; Aria Dean, Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo; lonesome crowded west, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles; Gut Pinch, The Sunroom, Richmond; and White Ppl Think I’m Radical, Arcadia Missa, London. Dean has also participated in group exhibitions internationally at Greene Naftali (New York); Tai Kwun, Hong Kong; The MAC, Belfast; ICAVCU, Richmond; Het Hem, Amsterdam; ICA Philadelphia; Higher Pictures, NY; Bodega, NY; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin. She has lectured and presented work at various institutions such as MMK Frankfurt; Yale University; Swiss Institute, NY; Serpentine Galleries, London; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Cranbrook Art Museum; La Casa Encendida; Transmediale Festival; and Atlanta Contemporary.

Jiří Kovanda was born in 1953 in Prague, where he lives and works.

K.R.M. Mooney (b. 1990) is an artist based in Oakland, California, USA. Their works have been displayed in solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig in Braunshweig, David Dale in Glasgow, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Group exhibitions include Sculpture Center in New York, KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, White Flag Projects Library in St. Louis, Futura Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, Altman Siegel in San Francisco and Essex Street in New York. Mooney studied at Central Saint Martins in London and California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Bri Williams (b. 1993) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. She has participated in shows at Queer Thoughts (NY), Ramiken Crucible, Karma International LA, and has an upcoming solo exhibition at Queer Thoughts. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Mills College. Through crafting and composition, Williams allows her objects to embody the the abstract: the incommunicability of pain and our inherited mythical figures.

home school is a free pop-up art school co-run by manuel arturo abreu and Victoria Anne Reis, in its fifth year of curriculum presenting multimedia, genre-nonconforming edutainment and creating welcoming contexts for critical engagement with contemporary art. home school has previously curated exhibitions and projects with composition, Portland; Compliance Division, Portland; S1, Portland; Portland Community College Paragon Gallery; the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland; MoMA P.S. 1, NYC; the Re:Art Show, old Pfizer Factory, NYC. home school has received support from the Precipice Fund, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Allie Furlotti/the Calligram Foundation, a Rhizome Net Art Microgrant, Regional Arts and Culture Council project grants, and Yale Union.