Jan. 19th Yesterday’s Parties with Yann Gerstberger and Jo Kim / Hot Clock Rhythm by Leonel Salguero

Climate Control
19 January 2024

Yesterday’s Parties is an exhibition by Yann Gerstberger and Jo Kim. It takes its name from Gerstberger’s painting of the same title.

Yann has been a close friend for years, and our discussions about a never-ending exhibition, an exhibition that is a story, that is theater, that is autobiographical are part of what I am trying to make a reality today at Climate Control.

Jo Kim entered the gallery and this story only a few months ago but has become an integral part ever since. Her delicate paintings are full of inner strength.

Their works face off in the corner of a room, offering both a look back and a glance forward. Like a spinning top, the exhibition tells a story unfolding at varying speeds and in different directions in time.

It brings me great pleasure to showcase their work together.

instalation view

Yann Gerstberger
Yesterday’s Parties, 2024
oil stick, pastel, charcoal and dye on canvas
59 x 47 inches

installation view

Jo Kim
Drama, 2024
Ink, acrylic, paper on linen
8 x 10 inches

Jo Kim
Falling Leaf, 2024
Inkjet, ink, rice paper collage
8 x 10 inches

installation view

Boredom is a hard thing to convey, or encite camaraderie in – in the present it most dominantly appears as an enviable state of the privileged or a languid entrapment of those in the throws of class struggle, unknown to themselves. Boredom, and one’s experience of everyday banalities are not the same but synonymous, related. Boredom remains mostly undisturbed by the record keepers of our worlds, but banalities are given the silhouettes of narrative, like Ursula LeGuin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, our first human tools might have been bags to hold things (or ourselves) not spears to throw and hunt. But bags are used, they fall apart, they’re quotidien, and the story of a hunt is more exciting than the story of a hold. The spear is thrown and it’s sensational, the story is repeated. A new bag is made, and the sensationality is quiet, soft, sweet, and slow.

Leonel Salguero’s Hot Clock Rhythm is an arrangement of six small oil paintings on canvas or wood panel. Four of the works are of a Zoom H1n Handy Recorder which he often carries with him, collecting sounds. There is a puff, a windscreen, that sits on top of the recorder to help record clearly. Like hair, each recorder is given a different style matching differing stages of growth in life. They remind me of iconic genres of music. One of the works is of a forest-like landscape, where a snake’s path on a sandy ground forms a trail of sound waves. The final work is a re-appearance of Malibu Meteorite shown in a previous iteration of Garden of Eden. In this work, a close-crop of a red car bumper has been bashed in, hit by a meteorite that fell from the sky. Leonel explained to me that very few recorded images of things being hit by meteorites seem to exist, after finding this one he searched for others for some time.

A band of listeners to the artist’s everydays, assembled.

At the most grand scale histories past have given us a buffet of everydays – if the belt turned, and we swapped plates, we’d find extremes thread throughout our banalities in grotesque ways. Éduard Glissant was an important French poet and writer from Martinique who argued, with a historical analysis of the Carribeans, for a type of relation which produces difference in lieu of collapsing culture for conveyance. In doing so he champions a kind of narrative shift away from epic myths of movement and towards conveyance of the common itself. In Poetics of Relation he writes, “amassing commonplaces is perhaps, the right approach to my real subject – the entanglements of world-wide relation,” Amassing is in itself commonplace – the more of something, the more common it is. I imagine a boredom that isn’t mine, or a boredom that isn’t yours – applied widely now, it may engender riots. I don’t believe everyone should have the same experience of the everyday, (that would be terrible), or that they even could, but with more of them, we can visit each other. Commonalities among the bizarre may not make the bizarre less so. It is harder to enter a story of a bag than a story of a spear, but in contrast to the spear’s heroism, the bag constructs, pulls us in rather than apart.

The title of the show comes from the sound of Leonel’s oven, ticking away its heat, recorded with his recorder in the paintings. Spectacular and banal at the same time, the rock opera and I face the beach and a meteor-stricken vehicle, listening together.

–Emily

installation view