Posthumous Lives : Mitchell Anderson, Jon Rafman

Let's begin with an inherited belief — a vague picture of

what exists beyond this life and extends uncertainly so

into the next. Rendered material and concrete, this

spirit is bound up in mundane stuff and built into vacant

containers: dead stock trading cards, stacked up produce

crates, idle confessionals. These things in themselves

move us, provide a platform for an idea, demarcate a

portal to a vision - a second life, a better life, a

fully lived life. A certain kind of feeling exceeds these

containers to transmit the promise of pleasure, all

guaranteed by the touch of this talisman or the clutch of

that prosthesis. Typically these objects are

unremarkable, special for their generic qualities. For

instance, cheap cloth adorns the table, or a medieval

gif, lifted from some archive, decorates the chamber.

Here they’re turned. Mostly by themselves. These mantles

lend to the projection of reveries, passions. The works

in this exhibition express this spirituality, anchoring

us to the decidedly unspectacular. It becomes the other.

Our expectations push, rub up against these prosaic

things to reveal the magic of purported gravitas. These

artworks ground an other world in this one; they confess

the basic human search as formed in the present.

Piper Marshall