About the Exhibition
Daily Ritual showcases the work of artists Chloë Bass, Francesca da Rimini, Lenny Silverberg, Susan Weil, and Adrianne Wortzel whose respective practices are diaristic or journalistc in contemplative, personal, and political ways. The project is curated by Amanda McDonald Crowley.
Daily Ritual proposes that these ritualistic, meditative, and often extremely intimate practices become content for narrative forms of art-making: an artistic practice of sequencing, like pages of a book, either deliberately or unintentionally ordered and executed as book art, as art books, as digital story-telling, or as some unique combination thereof.
A limited-edition catalog accompanies the exhibition.
About the Artworks
• Chloe Bass’ #sky #nofilter is a photography, text, video, and performance project capturing the political uncertainty of 2016 and 2017. What started as a way of marking time and a philosophical investigation of digital “seeing,” quickly became a chronicle of every day she woke and went into the world during a year that left her, as a Black American, increasingly agoraphobic and traumatized. The project’s second phase matched the sky images with a longer piece of personal text about abstraction and empathy.
• Francesca da Rimini’s Ghost Fields is an early web environment that hosts an online illuminated diary elaborated during her residency at Marko Peljhan’s Makrolab on Rottnest Island. The island carries the burden of being Australia’s largest deaths-in-custody site. The diary documents daily rituals of living and working in the Makrolab, weaving in and out of her previous online work, dollspace.
• Either Way It’s Perfect is Lenny Silverberg’s collaboration with his deceased wife, Noni Reisner. Noni had dementia in the final years of her life, and Lenny cared for her. She loved language, but her dementia caused her to blurt out sayings and odd short sentences. During those years, he collected these sayings but it was only after she died that he began making watercolors and drawings—combining her words with his images as a ritual practice to deal with grief, and to remember her life.
• For over 35 years, Susan Weil has been daily creating Poemumbles: interwoven images and poems. In her words, they “explore the poetic fluidity and limitless potential of word and image that exist beyond the boundaries of text.”
• Adrianne Wortzel’s See No Evil is a year-long diary of images and text made into an artist’s book. The text is written a stream-of-consciousness style and then masked in part by drawings of creatures from Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Inquiries can be directed to a@adriannewortzel.com.
About the Reading Room
A Reading Room accompanies the Daily Ritual exhibition, offering a space for visitors to reflect on the idea of the artist’s diary and diaristic art.
In addition to selections by curator Amanda McDonald Crowley, the Reading Room features books from our collections related to journaling, daily life, and memory. For example, Jamie Livingston’s powerful Some Photos of that Day, edited by Hugh Crawford, shows Livingston’s years-long Polaroid-a-day project, which spans from when the artist was in college through his cancer diagnosis and up to the day he died.
The Reading Room also includes examples of daily or diary comic zines, offering visitors a lighthearted and compelling slice of life; books in which artists use others’ diaries as the inspiration for their artworks; and reference books about making handmade diaries and using journaling as a creative practice.
Visitors are invited to peruse the books in the reading room at their leisure and consider how we can draw inspiration from everyday life as well as how the accumulation of daily documentation—whether through photography, writing, illustration, or another medium—can reveal the most tender and poignant aspects of being human.
Images courtesy the artists, Photos by Oswaldo Garcia.
