Preservation Instincts

An exhibition at the ICA offers a variety of creative answers to the same question: What drives our impulses to preserve?

Murmur is one of those words that sounds like what it means. It’s hard to dream up a better word for under-the-breath grumbling or a crowd’s hushed whisper as it ripples through an auditorium. You can’t catch the words in or the exact meaning of a murmur, but you feel it — a general sense of derision, wonder, or surprise.

MURRMUR,” however, is a research project and exhibition series at the ICA and in this case, it’s an acronym. It stands for Misread Unread Read Re-Read Misread Unread Re-Read. The project brings artists together to create new work inspired by the activities and concepts around reading, publishing, and distributing art. “Blurs and Senses” is the second exhibition in the series and it’s specific focus is on issues around the preservation of information. The five artists in the show, who are also writers, designers, and publishers, were asked: What drives our impulse to discard? What drives our desire to keep? How do the traces of what no longer remains affect our experience of the present?

The resulting pieces are vibrant, conceptual, ironic, and fascinatingly different from one another.

James Hannaham’s piece “Firmament Unstable, Declares Chicken” (2023) focuses on the syntax and rhetoric of newspaper headlines and the way they’ve become increasingly interchangeable with clickbait web content. Phrases like “Aspiring Despots Claim Victimhood” and “Obvious Thing, Refuted For Decades, Now Undeniable” scroll as quickly as the current news cycle across three flat screen TVs mounted on the wall. The headlines are funny in a terrifying, life-is-stranger-than-fiction sort of way. We don’t need John Carpenter’s “They Live” sunglasses because what they reveal isn’t even hidden anymore.

Lauren Francescone, “Plateau,” 2023, glazed ceramic, glass, dimensions variable, Installation view, “MURRMUR: Blurs and Senses,” ICA at VCU, 2024. (artwork © Lauren Francescone; photograph by David Hale)

Ceramicist, Lauren Francescone’s piece, “Timeline” (2023) is a dozen or so shiny, glazed ceramic and glass shapes mounted on the wall. Some look like tile, others are curved tubes, others moon-like circles. Some are smooth and some are unfinished at the edges like they might be pieces of something larger, but what? Their cool colors are soothing, like the color palette of a doctor’s waiting room. Their arrangement feels very particular and purposeful like they’re meant to represent something beyond themselves; the building blocks of an idea or the traces of a language—the syntax, the beginnings of letters. A code maybe, but for aliens or future humans. Francescone takes the questions “MURRMUR” asked and re-asks them rather than answering them.

“MURRMUR: Blurs and Senses,” installation view, ICA at VCU, 2024. Foreground to background: partial view of Zeynab Izadyar (VVORK VVORK VVORK), “The Stages of a Tulip’s Life Cycle, Angry Waters,” 2024; James Hannaham, Firmament Unstable, Declares Chicken, 2023. (artwork © Zeynab Izadyar, James Hannaham; photograph by David Hale

Zeynab Izadyar’s piece “The Stages of a Tulip’s Life Cycle, Angry Waters” (2023) is breathtaking in its hugeness and implications. This work is made under her moniker VVORK VVORK VVORK—moniker doesn’t seem quite right, it’s more like her label, and it works that way, too; how the fashion brand Comme des Garçons represents an aesthetic rather than founder Rei Kawakubo’s singular vision. VVORK VVORK VVORK’s aesthetic might be called wearable landscape or human figure an earthwork. “The Stages of a Tulip’s Life Cycle, Angry Waters” is two pieces. One is comprised of huge swathes of fabric printed with the image of a waterfall and draped down the wall. The material pools at the bottom and ekes across the floor. The other piece hangs flat against the wall next to the fabric waterfall. It’s a deconstructed suit—the front of a leg, the sleeve, the pocket—like the paper patterns you’d use to sew a garment. It’s mounted in a way that suggests the shape of a human figure. The right front pant leg is next to the left front pant leg. The whole suit stretches up toward the ceiling rivaling the size of the waterfall. Some panels are painted with flowers and others look like they were made from the waterfall’s spray. Arranged this way, the suit pieces become a giant contemplating the beauty of a waterfall. A kind of emotional connection is felt between them: both out of proportion, constructed of fabric, affixed to the wall. It becomes very moving and beautiful to compare the grandeur of a waterfall to that of a person. A natural resonance emerges, even as their differences present themselves: the flatness of the suit and it’s logical construction, the waterfall’s heavy deluge of fabric and it’s messy expansion on the floor.

A large bright orange, blue, and green tent-like structure occupies the rest of the gallery. It is made of hastily hung tarps and inside is a pile of scattered debris, broken pieces of things, sand, fake flowers. It looks like both an altar and an abandoned human settlement. It has a nostalgia to it; whoever was here is gone, whatever this was built for is over. And this feeling is apropos because this piece is “spread (embassy)” (2024) and it accompanied a live performance by “ssSssssssssss,” a collaboration between the artists Ashkan Sepahvand and virgil b/g taylor. “ssSssssssssss,” pronounced like a long sibilant s sound (think hiss without the first two letters), literally leaves behind the evidence of an artistic creation as their contribution to “MURRMUR.” The toppled vessels, crumpled dollar bills, and tangles of LED lights in conjures ideas about the preservation of works of art themselves. Not everything every artist creates can be saved—so what gets preserved and why?

The delight of “MURRMUR” is in the incredible variety of the pieces. Given the same set of questions these artists produced completely different responses. To see the sleek, quiet ceramic work of Francescone in the same room as ssssssssSssss’s haphazard, colorful explosion or Hannaham’s black and white digital text scrolling next to Izadyar’s lush, effusive waterfall is a celebration of the human imagination.

“MURRMUR: Blurs and Senses” is organized by ICA Assistant Curator of Commerce and Publications Egbert Vongmalaithong and runs through June 9 at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU.

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