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May 23, 2024

Frances Brady: Much More Together

Underdonk is tucked in a humble room on the second floor of an industrial building. Inside, eleven intermedial assemblages that traverse painting and photography comprise the exhibition, Frances

Underdonk is tucked in a humble room on the second floor of an industrial building. Inside, eleven intermedial assemblages that traverse painting and photography comprise the exhibition, Frances Brady: Much More Together. Frances Brady is the moniker of a collaborative project by two queer artists, Brooklyn-based Marta Lee and Chicago-based Anika Steppe, who asynchronously created these works by sending snapshots of their individual lives to each other and appropriating received images. The imagery is mounted on plain white walls in no particular order, and afforded a formal flare of sculptural sensibility by virtue of being transferred onto a physical panel or canvas.

One of the first works a visitor encounters is effortless ease (2023), where fragmented signs and symbols scatter on a two-dimensional surface that resemble the close-up of a folded blanket or a towel. Digital manipulation bearing the influence of Louise Lawler irreverently stretches parts of the flat plane, creating pixelated edges pointing outward toward implicated spectators. Invoking the representational mystique of pictures, effortless ease lays bare the amenable materiality of virtual signs.

Unknowable Signals (2023), a conceptual exercise in abstraction, liberally occupies one whole wall. Dotted by rune tiles of no clear origin, Unknowable Signals maps out the uncharted cartography of fraught communication, suggesting the elusive nature of pinning down the act of collaborating across time zones and physical distances into a structured discourse. Its pronounced obscurity points to the processes of artmaking as a defiant refusal of easy categorization and identification. Next to such an intricate exposé of the limits of language are two instances of relying on an alternative field of vision. Looking down; Lennie’s debut (2023) pays homage to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in their shared affinity for seriality and recursivity while demonstrating a posthuman commitment to capturing traces of non-human others. Looking Down; A Round U (2023) playfully performs a study of the self-referentiality of a speech act in a Michel-Majerus-meets-Wade-Guyton manner. Its uncontained brushstrokes gesture to proliferating contradictions and slippages between signifiers and signified. Similarly, One and one is there (2023) dissects the arbitrariness of linguistic constructs through domino, an art-historical motif richly referenced within the canon of early modernism.

Elsewhere, a USPS package takes on a recurring role. Its coarse, veined, yet translucent texture becomes the medium for creating unruly, shimmery fixatures of reflection and shine in The vehicle becomes the thing (2023), reminiscent of Nan Goldin’s fuzzy, unfocused photographs of empty spaces in her grid series. The plastic package’s ghostly analog negatives are then meticulously restaged, reframed, and reformatted in Although that sounds dumb (2023) with an archival impulse that carefully documents how one image accumulates and mutates.

The more painterly-oriented pieces do not disappoint. All dressed in radiant colors (2023) sensuously passes through the Warholian machine of repetition and generates vibrant theatrics of morphological transmutation. Twice removed (Bubbles) (2023) reveals the unpredictable modality of translation and transference, rift with chance and accident, through presenting the canvas as an unstable ground on which previously segregated histories of materials conflate and dissolve into each other.

The monumental yet witty Double skunk (2023) is the star of the show. Advertising imageries of card games, hand-drawn cards, and scanned photographs of involved hands intersect to form an expansive, non-linear landscape of gist and interplay, devoid of semiotic hierarchy or readily readable meaning. The larger-than-life installation A view of a view of a view (mine, yours, theirs) (2023) takes the reciprocal exchange between difference and repetition to its logical conclusion as the view from an anonymous window unfixes itself to a labyrinthic web of ephemeral interpretations and fleeting points of entry (thanks to the air conditioner!).

Much More Together posits an emerging oppositional politics of queer friendship by exploring the symbolic economy of meaning production and distribution in all their short-circuits and glitches, private remembrance and public (mis)recognition, and unscripted alliance and orchestrated betrayal. With a heightened sensitivity to the assumed neutrality of grid-as-representation and an openness to an array of critical strategies that throw such representational mode into deviance and flux, Much More Together postulates the ethical responsibility and relational obligation of being called upon by the unknown and the unseen. A poetic of affective reverberations, Much More Together dives into the psychical afterlife of images and comes out with unresolved and spiraling conclusions.

Qingyuan Deng is an emerging curator and writer working and living in New York City and Shanghai. He holds a BA in art history from Columbia University with a focus on Relational Aesthetics and experimental filmmaking.