Pre-Text n.1

November 30th - December 22nd, 2018

Featured artists: Jordan Gravely, Lucas Thomas, Viviane LeCourtois, Donald Fodness, Holly Nordeck, Jordan Knecht, Matt Plain, George P. Pérez, Kristen Hatgi Sink, Noah Travis Phillips.

The absence on an otherwise empty plot of land can be regarded as full of the most precious of resources: potential. This potential can manifest a library, a community garden, a bar, an apartment complex, or a parking lot. However, these potentials cannot all be actualized simultaneously. On this specific plot of land, one project will manifest while the rest remain in a hinterland of sorts, perhaps partly made substance in the form of a preliminary sketch or to-scale model, or perhaps only inscribed on the grey matter of a mind shrouded from an outside world, guaranteed its own small piece of real-estate for a limited time.

This matter-of-fact, or fact-of-matter, that objects occupy space and that occupied space is proportionately reduced in potential, incentivizes something of a competition. What potential gets to be actualized? What is the process that allows for an idea to become implicated in a physical or social medium? This is a question of economics. The value of that space and the substances that could inhabit is a reflection of this competition. Typically those with less means lose out on the bid. The value of the idea itself is no promise of its realization; it is not the basis upon which actualization is decided. However, money is not the only obstacle to making something actual. Money is an expression of social confidence, something used to orient productive energy. Fundamentally, what is needed to make an idea actual is a community.

Pre-Text is a community forum. The context of the exhibition is one in which creators, predominately artists, are asked to meditate on potentiality. Here they present those ideas they would love to make actual, most in the form of the proposal. With the ideas thus laid bare, one can meditate upon a potential in its most raw form. One can determine for oneself what is lost, if anything, in experiencing a project in this form. This is also a context in which to make these ideas actual, if only in the collective imaginations of members of a community.