video, 40' 41'', 2017
text description:
The fifth chapter of Untitled Practice continued the development of a self-generating abstract system, this time unfolding within the dispersed, flat, almost metaphysical context of Los Angeles. The project remains rooted in the tension between formal autonomy and external pressure. The economic and emotional conditions of alienated labor—particularly in the service industry—inform the atmosphere of this volume, not explicitly, but as undercurrent. Within this context, abstraction becomes a kind of purposeless imagination: not directed toward productivity, but offered as a tool for encounter, speculation, and temporary liberation.
text description:
The fifth chapter of Untitled Practice continued the development of a self-generating abstract system, this time unfolding within the dispersed, flat, almost metaphysical context of Los Angeles. The project remains rooted in the tension between formal autonomy and external pressure. The economic and emotional conditions of alienated labor—particularly in the service industry—inform the atmosphere of this volume, not explicitly, but as undercurrent. Within this context, abstraction becomes a kind of purposeless imagination: not directed toward productivity, but offered as a tool for encounter, speculation, and temporary liberation.
Unlike previous chapters, this iteration became a shared framework: the artist invited input from the people in the areas where he was working, mostly restaurant coworkers and unhoused individuals in downtown LA, offering a series of questions about visual preferences and compositional decisions to shape the sequence.
For the first time in the project, the abstract system was made available to others as a structure to be inhabited and co-navigated. This opening of the system intersects with the discourse of an authorship and postmigration conditions—where movement, labor, and exchange blur the boundaries between insider and outsider, author and participant.
For the first time in the project, the abstract system was made available to others as a structure to be inhabited and co-navigated. This opening of the system intersects with the discourse of an authorship and postmigration conditions—where movement, labor, and exchange blur the boundaries between insider and outsider, author and participant.