LORENZA LONGHI: you're in business? I'm in business.

January 26 - March 29, 2019

Opening Friday, January 25  19 - 21h

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Lorenza Longhi raids society for its deceptive structures, codes and verses. This supposedly neutral plunder is remixed and duplicated, highlighting and complicating its primary form. Her work deals with the reproduction, but at a level that exposes its labor, craft and the worker’s hand. The modular USM Haller home and office furniture system of 1963 is an icon of mid-century design and aspirational luxury. It has been endlessly noted for its ability to morph and expand between the arenas of working and private life with an unbiased visual cool. It is both Swiss and neutral. The sculptures in this exhibition clone a classic of this system. On inspection they are brazenly unique, non-modular and defy the desire to find use in them beyond the cultural. There are esoteric power dynamics at play here, a rejection of the increasing tendency towards the 24-hour-a-day home/office office/home, a questioning of standardized good taste and a reminder that nothing can be nonpartisan. At Plymouth Rock, a cast-off space meant as a near windowless office, they demand to be seen as both pure sculpture and binary referent in their natural habitat. The ability to view these works is slippery as their existence flickers around their perceived nature and the truth of understood existence. Longhi speeds us into a rendered world on the other side of the uncanny valley, forcing a questioning of more than the artisanal art object. What is reality here, the simulacrum or the impression of the mass produced lie? Who is in control when the fraud is faked?

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