GREG SMITH

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.

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.

David-Wynn: Miller (born 1948/1949) began his professional career as a tool and die welder, then in 1988, after divorce proceedings and the ensuing child custody battle, he formulated the pseudo-legal language of "Quantum Grammar." Made in response to what Miller saw as a rigged and unfair judicial system, the legalese was purported to guarantee legal success, dismiss taxes, and disbar judges.

Miller's self-proclaimed resume includes educator, ambassador, postmaster, legal scholar, plenipotentiary-judge, the king of Hawaii, and genius. Miller claims he crowned himself king of Hawaii in 1996 after turning Hawaii into a verb.

Smith describes the installation as an attempt to make the experience of Miller's world corporeal. It's a place of confusion cloaked as precision, and cons masked as insight. Miller's endless list of voids reflects the opaque, vacuous nature of his writing. But perhaps – in places of unexpected poetry or amidst Miller's relentless creative labor – these voids also suggest sites of possibility.

Text, both handwritten and printed, fills the exhibition, providing the viewer with excerpts from Miller's writings. These are linked with additional thoughts on voids, including excerpts from books on negative space. Accompanying these texts are stark printouts of black and white stripes, taken from the American flag header on Wynn-Miller's website. These disembodied stripes in greyscale become yet more voids, literal depictions of gaps or spaces between.

Suit jackets made of unconventional materials populate the exhibition, hung simply on wire hangers. Dubbed "void-wear" by Smith, the blazers vary in their materiality but share a distinct throughline: if worn, these pieces of outerwear would cover up very little. TITLE-AS-VOID, for example, is made of aluminum and fiberglass screen, woven with loose threads, and covered with various pockets full of stones. Heavy, see-through, and sharp, they project a sense of discomfort and futility.

A reference to the expected dress code of the courtrooms in which Miller's "QUANTUM GRAMMAR" is meant to be employed, the "void-wear" works are spectral and reject their intrinsic wearability, due to "textile" choice and lack of concealment. VOID OF ANY, ALL, OTHER pushes inconvenience even further, draped from a tent-pole in the entryway of the gallery, far out of reach.

The centerpiece of Every Void of dwmlc.net is the kinetic installation MURMURS AND SOUNDS WITH A VOID. Every 8 or so minutes, the sculpture whirs to life, a symphony of tent poles clacking into one another, creaking wooden armature, and the motor that sets the movement in motion. The piece oscillates from left to right, striking the wall on either side. It moves with a sense of futility, and sounds as precarious as it looks, a manifestation of Miller's overcomplicated and historically useless constructed language.

Yet it hovers over an empty space marked out by tent poles and metal screen. This void contains only a group of books, all with the title "Negative Space." Some of the books consider the potential of the concept with nuance and play, while others layer in the literally negative: drug abuse, violence, sexual harassment, and more. Miller's digested text – transformed into some sort of wrecked sculptural aspergillum – crashes and floats above it all.

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 navigates how systems of communication are constructed, dispersed, and convoluted. 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; The Suburban, Milwaukee; and White Columns, NYC, among others. His work has been featured in exhibitions at The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; and the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. Smith was awarded a Guggenheim Grant in 2013.

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GREG SMITH: Every Void of dwmlc.net

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