Alex Peters, 'Blowback'.

2 - 23 Mar 2024

I am locked
Ass ymetric
I am beer battered
I am locked
‘ardly functional
Like indispensable

or occupational
Compatriots
I am standing here
another totem unto pivot
surrounded by ladles masking
evidence of decay
in unitary
scoring themselves
unison
soliciting one another
into echo chambers

a’gain a’gain a’gain

In her solo exhibition Blowback at Asbestos gallery, Alex Butros presents a dislodged grid of up-cycled metal fixtures; retouched cabinets and gas canisters, allotted, ornate and dominated by three industrial blades descendant from the blast of a fan unit. Blown the fuck back, some cunt is flying, fan force style shit, throttling against aluminum edge, bevelled and embossed into columns. This fucking manifested room and its fucking visitors, controlled by mechanics not dissimilar to the rigid machinery of compounded print formations. Massive. An image is crafted, then grafted into symbolic graphic sublimation. Fixated metallic agendas that infer the hand of a stockman, mechanic, harbor, or the mythos of the heavy metal blacksmith. She’s beautiful this fucking cabinet. Who chose the colour of her nails, the colour of her stock lists and suspension files. Crystal. Throw back. I said something inside her, Told No Feud, in-scripted. Detailed like that car she borrowed. The Mall. I was sitting right there, hawking and sterilised. Against any will I assume attention over. Autistic neutrality is a soothing remedy for contained fascism. And besides, it was another decade, the people drew teal and mauve. Scrapped from the earth. Chromatics. Would you sit at Northland Shopping Centre bus stop, by the car parks, give a kid a cigarette and sniff paint with me. Could you find yourself there with me, somewhere in that shithole. I’m still waiting for that bus and I know that if it came, I would sit in my seat and ensure I could see the sun glaring through straight down, on me, blinding my senses. I don’t want to see the faces of these ugly suburban motherfuckers who live in my area, or hear their lowly music blasting through the phone speaker.

I want to turn into a unit. I used to fuck this unctuous city. There’s oil everywhere, it’s spilling over like piss left under the toilet seat for months. I told her to use urine instead of cleaning vinegar. Piss is having a Come Back, Blow Back, I can tell you that much. It’s laden with seed. Some people eat well, organs to aid the filtration of their gassed interior chamber, coffined, lungs loaded with tar, menthol cigarettes and pulmonary embolism. Somatic cell regeneration. I’m a tank full of piss and I am incredibly paranoid about the end of my co-habituation with this territory. That is, the dirt underneath, that concrete, underneath, this carpet. Methodics. Laden with interiority, she’s a graphic designer, a home decorator. Hydria, Pelike, Amphora. These are the names of the House Wives. You’ve already heard about care. In my mind, oil is cheaper than vinegar, and the children are sick. They keep walking through corroded rooms, trying to get into the next room, in search for mineral substitutes. Licking salt deposits off the gravel. Dietary Specimens. Cow milk and propane. Vascular and molecular operations. Cybernetic vomit enhanced into arbitrary graphic units. It is a Graphic Unit. I have been assaulted by molecular grids. Background noise, textural grit, soot and shit that I smeared onto the earth and said, take this, take this O flat and static earth and give something back to yer shafted self. Cumulate data, and augment it into documented paralysis. Flattened codecs of violence, reproduced unto dead graphics, distributed by means of liturgy and imitation. She said it wasn’t object permanence, just half-tone. And half beat. Fuckin’ dead beat. Clinical detractions form themselves towards domestic constituents. An amplification of modernist partitions. She said borrow me, I am an ornament. Burdened by decorative ownership. Gauged podiums for chambered memorials; where death and cavities subsume their own dominance. One of a million; tilted towards a tradition of extradited design, or something once recognised by the unfortunate as propaganda.

Text by Carmen-Sibha Keiso