THE ARMORY SHOW 2024 | 6 - 8 September 2024

In 1994, Matthew Marks, Pat Hearn, Paul Morris, and Colin de Land rented a section of rooms at the Gramercy Park Hotel and hosted the first edition of the Gramercy International Art Fair, renamed the Armory Show in 1999. 30 years later, with expanded venues and a wide variety of platformed artists, exhibitors, and movements, the Armory Show has cemented its legacy as a premier art fair on the New York scene.

Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator at The Kitchen, has made the fair's origins and its renagade spirit the organizing principle behind this year's Focus Section. Underscoring its avant-garde character and interdisciplinary roots, Farrell looks back at the fair's history while contextualizing and highlighting nontraditional mediums and methodologies. As an early participant in the fair, Susan Inglett Gallery has been invited to present work by CHANNING HANSEN and WILMER WILSON IV, two artists who exemplify this experimental and nonconformist approach and wield their process and materiality in uniquely intricate ways.

CHANNING HANSEN approaches his compositions with a dedication to process. Skirting, spinning, and dyeing the wool of conservation-bred sheep, texture and tactility is present from the start. In prior works, chance played a key factor in his process, taking the form of a trained algorithm that produced the various and unique compositions. However, in Game Of Life, Hansen approaches the works differently.

"I have become increasingly aware of the way that my practice itself exists as a set of algorithms that dictate what is and isn't possible within its conceptual framework. The panels in Game of Life were an attempt to isolate elements from previous works as variables and recombine them through gamification using the rules that I set."

Hansen's interest in probability and chance are a nod to his grandfather, Fluxus artist Al Hansen, whose ideology placed significance on the experience of the artmaking process, the journey over the destination. By turning over the decision making process to the algorithm, Hansen questions free will and personal agency in a world that attempts to anticipate and simplify choice. Chance is introduced here in the installation method: Hansen turns the final installation plan over to an 8-sided die, a choice that is inherently of a Fluxus mindset. In doing so, Hansen emphasizes the modularity of the works, and in turn, the malleability of choice.

"With Game of Life, I am interested in 'algorithmic recursion.' By this, I mean I see myself, my practice, and the work I've made so far as embodying myriad algorithms and I'm interested in pulling apart the strands to look at individual elements and understand how their meaning is shaped by their context."

This installation is based on mathematician John Conway’s cellular automaton computer simulation “game” from 1970, called Life. Inspired by the life sciences, system theories and the cybernetics of John von Neumann, it is Turing complete, and can simulate a universal constructor or any other Turing machine.

"The game is used to explore the evolution of ecological communities and the rhizomatic co-formulation of self and world through fractal entanglement. This coming-together creates superorganisms that are examples of holistic theories such as the Gaia hypothesis, that claims that all organisms are intertwined in complex networks."

WILMER WILSON IV considers the constructed experience via an interdisciplinary practice of performance, sculpture, and time-based media. In his most recent exhibition with Susan Inglett Gallery, Wilson continued his work with staples on wood. Previously functioning as a protective membrane for imagery of Black bodies in found advertising material, Wilson extrapolates the staple-as-mark, wielding them in both a representational and abstract manner. Wilson uses these materials as investigations of urbanism, populace, and collective interaction.

Throughout Wilson's practice, skin is a recurring theme, be it various manifestations of skin, a physical thing that covers and conceals, or the concept itself, and all the socially-charged connotations that come with it. Here, the staples are skin-like, and to Wilson, are evidence of the walls bristling in defense, morphing in response to their environment, and reflecting back at the viewer its own understanding of humanity and togetherness.

“I want to imagine the staple surface as a protective, third eyelid of the wall. The non-figurative compositions here are speculative imaginings of how a wall is viewing a space that it’s in, and how the wall is reflecting back the physical space and social space that it might be situated in. There is a speculative, architectural quality to the reflections of these non-figurative works.”

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THE ARMORY SHOW 2024: FOCUS - Channing Hansen and Wilmer Wilson IV

SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY: THE ARMORY SHOW 2024 BOOTH F-19

CHANNING HANSEN

WILMER WILSON IV

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