Josh Krum, 'Crank'.

27 Aug - 10 Sep 2022

For his inaugural solo exhibition and third time showing with the gallery, Josh Krum has iteratively interpreted a specific synoptic formulae as a methodological axiom, whereby three sessions of materially-oriented artistic production are undertaken in order to produce, within a single sitting, both an entire body of work and a new interpretation of an approach. These episodic oscillations between surplus and depletion proceed as follows: the first Crank is concerned with adrenal necessity, the second with mechanical substitution and the third with infinity (speculation).

This primarily methodological approach intends only to be heretical, in that its parameters are unamenable to art (particularly painting) and it’s continual re-inscription of critical reflexivity, requiring instead the submergence of oneself into a prescribed state of artistically disinterested production, so that any co-implicated depressive fluxes of intensity, inspiration and relevance may be either overridden or circumvented.

In other words, Crank is warfare, like most other things; waged as both a foot soldier and a general, however not between any particular set of fronts, but within the fact of the front. Here, due to the absolute plurality of interests invested outside of its lived routine of violence, one side becomes uniquely disinterested in anything (criticality, contradiction, irony, sincerity, and so forth) aside from its immanent and contradictory material existence.