The exhibition Every Void of dwmlc.net begins with a website and an oath.
VOID-GRAMMAR-OATH:
I hereby dedicate myself to the corrupted language of David-Wynn: Miller. I embrace his all-caps zoology of the void: LODIAL-CONTRACT-VOID, VOID-MEANING, SWEAT-EQUITY-VALUE-VOID, and more. I commit to giving space to all 112 of them. I acknowledge Miller's links to the sovereign citizen movement, mass violence, anti-vaxxers, and January 6 insurrectionists. Can we hold our corrupted texts close while rejecting them? It seems they keep moving toward us.
The void isn't what it used to be. There's no single epic abyss, and there's no purity. Now, there are just so many of them.
With the numbers, voids become something we can count on and perhaps build on. As a starting point, I furiously misunderstand the endless legalese that David-Wynn: Miller produced before his death in 2018.
Miller called his opaque way of writing QUANTUM-GRAMMAR, and it's rife with magical thinking. By flooding the court system with documents that use his bizarre phrasing and punctuation, Miller promised that “The People” can take back legal and financial power. There is no dark maw here. Rather, these voids slip and double into threat/absurdity or possibility/collapse or weight/lightness. They hang unresolved like Schrodinger's cat superpositions.
Or maybe it's just nothing. Why hasn't Miller's nonsense dissolved? Or has it? Or have we? And what do these voids even look like?
Perhaps we ask too much of our words. The installation is heavy with text but giddy with material. Tent poles arch and collapse, void-wear doubles, frames buckle, and waxed bricks keep things in the air. Articulated banners try to end-run a corrupted text.
I, the artist Greg Smith, hereby submit my tent-pole negotiation under the 45-DAYS-TRUST-CONTRACT-VOID-RULE. I pledge that all is in conversation with Miller's voids, which might be ignored, might be the sites of potential, might be laughable, and might sit sweetly with the worst of our words.
GREG SMITH (b. 1970), in addition to receiving his MFA from Hunter College in 2005, graduated with a PhD in Physics from Harvard University in 2000. The artist is well-qualified and known for staging exhibitions that consider the possibilities and problems presented by our current technological deluge. He builds installations using an amalgam of unlikely materials and processes that trace contemporary limits of language, ownership, and governance. Through his enigmatic work, the artist delivers coded messages that reward the curious viewer with access to hidden assets. Smith has had solo exhibitions at the Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA; the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; and White Columns, NYC, among others. His work has been featured in exhibitions at The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami, FL; Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL; Marlborough, London, United Kingdom; and the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. Smith was awarded a Guggenheim Grant in 2013.
