Adriana Ramić
It also disappears

June 12–September 18 2022

Opening Reception
June 12 4–8pm

A chicken does not know it came from an egg. Effects cannot know their own causes. I understand this in terms of images; something that only reflects light cannot be looked into, something that only draws in light cannot be looked at. What an image [a chicken] is blocking with itself is not the light coming from behind it, but what it’s blocking with itself is its back.

Its back is not a linear transform of its other sides. The chicken is not a stutter of self-same images, all referring back to an originary crack. Rather, in itself, it’s like a family, uncomfortably related to one another, each a puffed up space of refraction.

The chicken’s back is the egg, and it is unknowable. The egg came first but you don’t have access to firsts. Firsts develop seconds, seconds envelop firsts, and so seconds cannot know firsts, because they are from firsts. As soon as anything is knowable, you’re already beyond firsts.

Chicken [scaled vector], envelope—all I observe are effects: moss on stone. We cannot see from inside a stone or the backside of a forward facing image. This may be the case with many things, but especially so with eggs, flower buds, machines, minds, speaker boxes—closed spaces where magic tricks take place.

Though seconds develop in a sequence of unfoldings, they come onto stage in a flash. Does it unfold its overlapping petals sequentially in a cascade of elegant curves, or does it enter the scene as an apparition whole, striking a pose at once, holding for o n l y a flash, because the world rarely allows for extremes, because it is an entropic trash bin.

The egg is incapable but productive in that it doesn’t merely contain information; it gains information. You do not hear sound waves but a voice. You do not see droplets but a cloud. We see the speaker that the voice is emitted from, which is smaller than what comes out of it. An egg can break things or be broken, reveal surfaces to be slanted, balance on the equinox. Yet, you do not see an egg.

Seeing is not-seeing and anticipating-seeing. As you’re seeing, you’re immediately not-seeing. All at once, in the dark: you’re seeing, you’re recognizing, you’re enacting that recognition, by reimplementing priors, and increasing the chances of seeing it again. Foresight by backsight, you cannot peel one from the other; we go from recording to projecting immediately.

Stacks of double sided photographs [passageways] can draw a face of non-change, an internal infinity. Drawn by frequency and resonance, beyond remembering and forgetting, everything is recorded, impressed and indexed into an ever-recombinable volume. Petites perceptions equals petites manifestations and petites unmanifestations in runaway recombinations.

The chicken’s life of unknowing the egg does not play out on a projection screen but is the sediment from subsurface computation and is also in itself computational. The score-like nature of nature turns bodies into sound boards. Musical notation comes after biology; it does not incite but recalls. Reflection, refraction and dispersion through droplets. What if the light could turn around and meet itself?

—Temra Pavlović

Adriana Ramić (b.1989, USA/PL) is an artist based in New York, NY and Lisbon, PT. Multidisciplinary and conceptual, her practice arises from the tenuous pathos in reconfiguring sentient traces among lifeforms and machines, encompassing installation, software, video, sculpture, drawing, and text, and often site-specific. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Stroom den Haag, the Hague, NL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI; Kimberly-Klark, New York, NY; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, NL; LUMA/Westbau, Zürich, CH; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, SE; and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, AT.

Temra Pavlović (b. 1990, NL) is an artist living in Amsterdam, NL.

Realized with the generous support of AiR351, FLAD (Luso-American Development Foundation), Kamen Artist Residency, and Robert Becraft. Color correction by Pascual Sisto.

Index of Scenes

Index of Scenes, 2022
3-channel video projection, panelled drinking glasses, velvet, wool, MDF
Dimensions variable
Time Without Passage, 2022
Giclée on archival paper in metal frame
22 x 36 inches (55.88 x 91.44 cm)