Joseph Grigely — Remains — Air de Paris Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 26 → December 1, 2012

A scrap of paper, discarded. A pair of buckets, turned upside-down. A pot-belly stove from an ice-fishing shanty. An empty storage rack. A bulletin board, at one moment covered with announcements and posters, at another moment empty of everything but staples and pins and bits of tattered paper. A photograph of someone singing from the New York Times. These are the remains of human agency — and the inimitable ways we leave behind traces of our movement through daily life.

The remains that constitute Grigely’s Remains are not the actualized objects that are left behind; rather, these objects are unmade and remade, and become reified extensions of their previous reality. Captions have been removed; colors have been changed; wood and cast iron have been replaced with crystal urethane. They were once useful objects—the papers carried conversations, the buckets carried paint, the stove produced heat, the storage rack held paintings, the newspaper conveyed timely information—but now their usefulness has transpired into a sort of uselessness; they have become, like the elements of classical still-life paintings, a part of a world ignored.