Joey Fauerso’s kinetic solo exhibition, her second at David Shelton Gallery, revels in the flash of possibilities. Across text, painting, film and sound, Fauerso luxuriates in a coiled chaos, telescoping from the whimsical, joyful intrigues of family to the dark, cresting tides arising from a year where the world is gripped with hatred and panic.
Several of the works space longer, surreally didactic poems with Fauerso’s monochrome paintings. Some of the text from the poems comes from things said by her children during make-believe games. As Fauerso states, “When children play and make-believe, the assigning of meaning and value is incredibly fluid. There is an elasticity to the naming of things.” These sequences are simultaneously instructive and disorienting, and much of the meaning alights and connects through the process of arranging.
The exhibition is inspired by Fauerso’s life, family, what she reads and what is happening in the world. Fauerso is keenly aware of the gap between these streams and the way they lattice together. Marcel Duchamp once referred to the space between components as the ‘infra-slim’, and suggested meaning could be located within this invisible seam. As A Soft Opening demonstrates, the infra-slim goes on forever.
-Neil Fauerso