No Archive Will Restore You
Julia Thompson
3218 Glendale Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90039
PRESS RELEASE
G-Son Studios, former recording space to the Beastie Boys, is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition, No Archive Will Restore You, a solo show by Julia Thompson.
I try to talk to you. Searching cavities for the word, in our idle speech, secret-ing, prolific, fallible. We carry it, prettily, pettily, properly, gossips. Before connoting a gatherer of falsehoods, the gossip was the god-sibb: a spiritual relation, an ordinary figure delivering divinity, so mundane as to be spectacular.1 I skim the shallows primordially aware they bear some semblance of the depths. Glossing it over, under the influence. Betraying the truth.
Glycerine is commonly utilized as a component of topical substances: its virtue emerges from its inertness, true surface-value, an ambivalent superficiality which functions as a portal for other, active elements. Material arriving through another material. As a natural preservative, the compound suspends and keeps-time, maintaining matter meant for transmission while nonetheless refracting the latter in its own subtle sheen. Like our gossip, glycerine constitutes a saccharine field of contact and reciprocity; it obscures immanent contents yet provides a point of entry. And like the archaic god-sibb, it takes on the modality of a safeguard,
an-ointment, operating on the level of affinity.
Thompson’s sculptures come into being using silicone molds made from contorted pillows, objects attendant to domains so intimate and ordinary as fatigue, tears, seduction, reverie. The semi-hollow forms act as containers for often prosaic images embedded within, protected and displayed by translucent resins and glycerine-derivatives. Responsive to fluctuating temperaments of light and warmth, they replicate the mutability of the memories that animate the work: remembrances which on one hand index plain affects of daily life, accumulating only to fall away in superfluity, regulating like organs, and on the other, resist sense and retain sensation with the mute force of a lesion, a condition to which we return and rub away at, vitally moved if heeding nebulous guides. Pedestals similarly composed of glycerine support the casts, with-standing their individual and collective variability, literally upholding what will inevitably efface itself. A repository of contingent bodies, No Archive Will Restore You catalogs the residues of lived experience, elusive and serially shifting. Resonant with the acuity of revelation.
– Paris Janet Beverly Reid
1 Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, the text from which the exhibition takes its name.