September 27th – December 1st

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, this project will undergo constant modifications; the features of this page provide accruing information on the project’s developments.

You never have it all at once, and you
always have too much. And
everything takes a long, long time.

This fall, Yve Laris Cohen and Park McArthur will begin work at 41 Grand Street as part of Recess’s signature program, Session. Session invites artists to use Recess’s public space as a studio, exhibition venue, or grounds for experimentation. For their Session entitled September 27th – December 1st, Laris Cohen and McArthur will use Recess as a space to work on individual and collaborative projects concerning the politics of inclusion, the inconclusive boundaries of subjectivity, and the aesthetics of care. Their efforts will consider the pressure that bodies barred from or refusing correction apply to the rehabilitative turn in contemporary art, as well as the generative consequences of delay in times of insistent, unrelenting presentness.

The artists’ lived realities in the studio workspace—negotiating physical accessibility, negotiating the conditions of storefront display—will generate aesthetic material. Born of their existing involvement in each other’s lives, Laris Cohen and McArthur’s artwork will engage the asymmetrical and layered relationships of bodies and objects: body to body, body on object, objects across bodies. Rather than taking a strictly phenomenological approach to temporality, degeneration, and coordination, the artists will present surfaces, texxtures, and residues as central platforms of activity and support.

Processes and procedures of art production and care work exceed and exhaust representation. By listing all of the people who have carried and lifted her body, for example, or by cataloging all of the surface imperfections made to his sculpture during construction and exhibition, both artists attempt to track genealogies. It is likely that, due to their incompleteness and overabundance, Laris Cohen and McArthur’s inventories only ever create left over material as they come into being.

Session invites artists to use Recess’s public platform to combine productive studio space with dynamic exhibition opportunities. Sessions remain open to the public from the first day of the artist’s project through the last, encouraging sustained dialogue between artists and audiences. Due to the process-based nature of Session, projects undergo constant revision and the above proposal is subject to change.