ALL THE TITLES FOR YOU TO SEE…

By Mike Chavez-Dawson, for Air Gallery’s Expanded Painting Open Call, 2022 'A durational performance embodying the ritual of ‘expanded painting’ – sees a multi-part work happening, with no real moment of entry, the performance is a process-led construct, with an open narrative for observation… The artist utilises a seemingly ritualistic process of handwriting/dripping the titles of the fellow exhibitors works from a set of ‘needle tip paint droppers’ onto off-white yellowing heavy stock paper, along with the titles pencilled in the bottom left. The titles of the works include words like Aperture, Bad Grammar, Closer, Can’t Beat ‘Em, Red Flux and Blue Peat (to name few) etc… These titles once dripped onto the paper are then folded in two, and then pressed together (creating the Chavez-Dawson ‘Text-Rorschach’ paintings), during this moment the artist will seek to ‘imagine that the essence’ of the artists' actual work becomes copied into the pressed image, the artist might also sing or say the title or accumulating titles of the work(s) during this process, they will then be opened and placed on one of the unfolded tables' surfaces. Other detritus of the process may end up in the waste bins flanking the production, failed ‘droppers’, empty paint tubes, paint soiled black flannels, black latex gloves, poorly executed hand-dripped works, and others. Accompanying the performance is a monitor with a ghostly moving image work and a disjointed hypnotic machinistic soundtrack – echoing/informing the procedure of production, the visual content may vary over the duration of the exhibition, as other segments of documentation gets added. This work seeks to embody the notion of memory failing, the gesture of capture, the fallacy of interpretation, the moment of paint drying, and the phantom of painting itself… https://www.airgallery.space/current