Amanda Crain-Freeland

To Hear, To View

Icebox Project Space

May 6th - 17th, 2025

Somedays the messenger gets lost. This winter at a memorial for influential poet Lyn Hejinian, a writer–Laynie Brown? Syd Zolf? Should have taken better notes–remarked on Hejinian's language as drawing focus through difference. Difference neither slippery slope toward skifflewiff chaos nor plurality as homogeneity. Underlining a fact: that chaos and homogeneity are not in opposition, differing poles, but rather synonyms. Difference, in Hejinian's distinctions, is a lack of eased agreement in tense or syntax or emphasis or tradition; is essential. Distance and distinction, even at its most jarringly dissonant defines and coheres a relationship with and edges, unlike chaos. I am me and you are you. Chaos here understood as absolute lack of distinctions. "I am he as you are he, as you are me and we are all together..." Closer to overcooked oatmeal, homogenous baseness, in chaos nothing comes to fore nor distinguishes. Everything sticks around. "Goo-goo g'joob."

Difference nourishes and distinguishes and churns. Difference as a three course and more setting for real change. Difference between makes language mean. This preamble on its way to a ramble is a way of underlining the fact that nothing directly connects the 27 artists assembled in this exhibition except for an overlapping period of time spent within Tyler School of Art. And to see any lack of coherence as a strength, allowing for some sympathies and resonance in their individual intuitions and intentions. To name a few: Appeals to timelines beyond the human, crafting durations that register a planetary scale. Belief in the power of small adjustments,

tweaks, and shims to hold enough weight to redefine what and how value is determined. To hum in counterpoint with the ambient noise of routines. Exploration of material labor as a way of recognizing that the world feels our actions to a greater degree than we register our feeling the world.

If there is any clarity in their multivocality, it is in tuning to languages that resist speaking with the emphasis of those oppressive and exclusionary forces that declaim so easily today with undeserved volume and consequential frequency. Given the current tsunami of crises and confrontations facing the artists, attacks on sovereignty, identity, impartiality, humanity, and given they are each beginning on a path, I'd like to extend the chance for each to band together with writer Enrique Vila-Matas. Within Insistence as a Fine Art, Vila-Matas declared "...I repeat myself in order to move forward. It wasn't for nothing that I decided to join the Brotherhood

of the Insistent. To project myself into the future, forever with the motto, 'When I get it right, I'll stop doing it.'" Naturally each to each will find their own brotherhood, sisterhood, communalhood, queerhood... perhaps even resisterhood.

Among the 27 here to view, beyond the major chords strike microtonal vibrations connecting particular artists and individual works, at times these minor countermelodies soothe, other times they sing conspiratorially. It is in that moment of needing to reset balance and shift your weight that collective becoming blooms.

- Anthony Elms

Introverted Paintings no.1 - 6
2025

picnic, lighning
Temple Contemporary
March 12th - 16th, 2025

Business or Pleasure
Double Tree Hilton Hotel, Philadelphia.
August 8th, 2024.

Worse For Wear
Telephone Gallery, Vancouver
Nov, 2022 - Jan, 2023

To be Worse for Wear is to be damaged by use or weathered over time. This applies to us as people as-much-as it does to our belongings. We replace worn out possessions online or in conveniently located shopping centres. Once inside, glass vitrines and window displays keep merchandise visible to customers yet safe from shoplifters and the touchy indecision of ‘just browsing’ types. At a jewellers, for example, these illuminated glass cases behave as prominent architectural features that define the character of the store. The line that separates precious from plain is drawn in plate glass and cold metal trim.

Amanda Crain-Freeland invents arduous material processes not in the service of small precious objects, but instead, to embellish the cumbersomely plain — often industrially made — furnishings of commercial exchange. Thus the roles are reversed. Plinths aren’t merely invisible supports for something of value, they themselves are the objects on display. The homemade Formica that dresses and protects them is incised with embroidery patterns to create an outmoded combination of overly decorated surfaces. These two tiled patterns interfere with one another like the moiré effect produced when you frame your television through your phone. A break in the illusion that reminds us that our ‘must-haves’ are the products of very effective mediation.

How objects of desire become desirable is a well-kept secret. Perhaps the X-ingredient is the mystery. Knowing too much about where something comes from, how it is made and by whom can sour the escapism guaranteed by a shopping spree. The artworks in Worse for Wear contend with the invisible labour that drives consumerism forward. For Crain-Freeland, folding is a fundamental kind of work that grants two-dimensional materials the volume and rigidity to stand upright in space. It is an equally monotonous errand in domestic and retail environments. Flipping the object upside down or turning it inside out reveals unfinished edges or remnants of adhesive — the traces of someone’s labour. Folding is therefore a transformative kind of work that necessitates an inside and an outside. The polished outside conceals an inside scarred with the seams that hold it together.

- Felix Rapp
https://felixrapp.com