Exhibitions > Last Things Essay
In the Country of Last Refuge is the third annual urbanism exhibition at Gallery Aferro. The 36 artists come from communities worldwide. Themes in exploration this year are geography, communication and explicitly for the first time, violence.
According to the New York Times, during 1978’s fiscal crisis, Newark police officers protested layoffs by standing at the city’s main entry points and handing drivers fliers that said, “Welcome to Fear City.” One of the characteristics distinguishing Paul Auster’s In The Country of Last Things from other apocalyptic fiction is the emphasis on the power of naming, words and writing to not just describe but define the edges of world.
Architect, artist and educator Troy West has described a state of almost round-the-clock scavenging of materials by various parties from antique buildings in Newark throughout the early 80’s. The exact location of a city’s identity and memory, and the relationship of that identity to violence is often a contested subject.
An anonymous group in Detroit, MI has for several years been painting abandoned houses throughout the city bright orange, with the goal of accelerating demolition by the city authorities and forcing attention to the city’s overall condition. From their manifesto: “These buildings aren't scenery. Don't look through or around them. Take action. Pick up a roller. Pick up a brush. Apply orange.”
By extending the reach of the exhibition to cities globally, the question of where the edge of the community is for each of us can be raised.
Titled after Paul Auster’s novel of the same name, 2004’s In The Country of Last Things was the debut exhibition at Gallery Aferro, newly renovated after a year and a half of work at 115 East Kinney Street, 4th Floor. The exhibition explored the notion of perception and reality in the urban setting, around the possibility that every city has a hallucinatory “double,” a shadow thrown by, among other things, TV news coverage of crime. It was a reaction to our immediate environment, as epitomized by the presentation of objects from Roy Crosse’s “No Seat in The Park,” a groundbreaking public artwork that garnered local press coverage only after vandalism of the work occurred.
Artists were: Thomas Torres Cordova, Roy Crosse, Thomas Mailaender, Tara Russo, Reed Slater and Emma Wilcox.
Object Motif: two hand-skinned rodent pelts
“Words tend to last a bit longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked.”
–In the Country of Last Things, Paul Auster
Apocalyptic imagery is difficult to purge from discussions of Newark, NJ. One city by that name has postal codes and is built with concrete and electricity. It has history, complexity and future. Another city by the same name is a nonexistent place by the river. It has no history because it has no time. Reference to its existence is useful in real estate transactions, law enforcement budgeting and political machination.”
In the Country of Last Things 4-Ever opened in 2006 in Gallery Aferro’s new, donated 20,000 sq ft building in downtown Newark.
The exhibition was a re-curation in reaction to change within the city, the degree of which varies depending on who you ask, to the eminent domain-induced eviction of Gallery Aferro in 2005 and the subsequent failure of that building to be transformed into the school the community had been promised. Themes in exploration included the transformative possibilities of end-times and the question of who ruins belong to.
Artists were: Eric Harvey Brown and Lori Baker, Maximilian Goldfarb, Bradley Lucas Hyppa, Reuben Lorch-Miller, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Christian Marc Schmidt, Pascual Sisto, and Claritas PRIZM Demographics.
Object Motif: a crowbar, “the universal key.”
“There is no later. This is later.” –The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Historian Thomas Gallagher, writing in Paddy’s Lament: Prelude to Hatred, described the wave of land evictions that occurred during Ireland’s great famine. These evictions were “…so legally impossible to prevent, that tenants whose homes were marked for destruction often helped to tear them down themselves on the promise that they would receive some gratuity for their labors.”
This money almost never appeared.
In assembling a disparate collection of artists, many of whom explore Sisyphean tasks or the suggestion of inorganic fecundity that discarded urban objects hold, this re-curation is an attempt to own painful experiences of urban life, to tear the house down before anyone else can.
