I Yield My Time. Fuck You!

Featuring: Nick Cave, Troy Chew, Wade Guyton, Samuel Levi Jones, Lynn Hershman Leeson, K.R.M. Mooney, Torey Thornton

The yielding of time signals a consciousness of how little space and agency we are granted – and the importance of leaving some for those who too often go unheard. Three weeks into nationwide protests against police brutality brought on by the murder of George Floyd, the Los Angeles Police Commission hosted a virtual community meeting via Zoom. After six hours of citizens decrying the police department’s violence and most recent misconduct towards demonstrators, Jeremy Frisch wasted none of his 30-second time limit. This exhibition takes its title from Frisch’s eloquent tirade turned viral rally cry.

It is not just Frisch’s perspective or his delivery that warrants consideration since we can imagine that there must be infinite unrecorded accounts of frustrated citizens in board rooms drilling civic authority figures, perhaps even with similar heights of style and punctuation. The reason any of us have heard of this specific moment is due to a sort of perfect contextual storm that surrounded and amplified Mr. Frisch’s exclamation through a unique social moment crossing paths with new technological possibilities for historicization and iconography. For every instance that gets captured and made iconic through mediation and memetic transfer there are infinite accounts that never enter the discourse and are denied their proper platform in society and in history. Every police video we see for instance, must stand in for a thousand other similar events not caught on tape. Technology has become essential to our aesthetic construction of histories and to our projections of the future, both for those in power and for the otherwise voiceless.

In moments of revolution we might locate clarity through distance from our prior consciousness. 2020 has offered arguably the most refined example of such an opportunity in our collective lives. Works exhibited six months ago might find radically different meaning within our new social context. With that in mind our exhibition proposes juxtapositions between different artist methodologies regarding societal collapse and social upheaval. Models of representation for these types of historical fulcrums can pull from a spectrum of sources, ranging from future fantasy aesthetics to something more closely resembling documentary. The reverberation between different methodologies is where the crux of the exhibition lies.

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For more information and artists’ bios please contact info@altmansiegel.com or 415-576-9300.

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