Strumming My Pain:

In Strumming My Pain, artists Philip Crawford, Nicolo Gentile, and Rachel Hsu carefully recalibrate perceptions of power through borrowed and repurposed forms. Their work is activated by an attention to self-reflexive movements, knee-jerk reactions, and instinctual wayfinding.

Crawford’s time-based work leverages an oblique reference from the film Boyz n the Hood, lingering in a mundane instance of kinesthetic praxis as resistance and respite. Through a longue durée, softly pixelated loop, Mechanisms of Rebellion (Baoding Balls) explores the regulatory (mechanized) nature of knowledge and the liberatory possibilities of ritual practice. The loop robs the repetitive turn of the meditation balls of their typically improvisational nature, and drops the unidentified black subject into the uncanny valley between man and machine.

This kinesthetic energy is magnified in Gentile’s found-object interventions. From the subtle odor of adrenaline-inducing ammonia salts embedded into a used cotton tank, to the mangled remnants of gym lockers, his selected sources cite the vitality and vulnerability of barred homosocial expressions and queered masculinities. In suggesting the entanglement of self-discipline and self-display, Gentile represents identity as an accumulated softness that resists rigid structure and confinement. 
Located inside Curioser’s repurposed cargo container, Hsu’s work All Hands examines language as a vessel through which we learn to navigate the world, and carry with us memories of distant homes and families. Carefully constructed from calligraphy practice paper, this sculpture considers the precariousness and preciousness of language, particularly in immigrant communities. The physical and emotional labor that communication demands of us requires we be beholden to each other, adrift together. For displaced bodies, memory becomes a stabilizing force not unlike the keel of a ship, enabling migrating wayfinders to find balance as they traverse uncertain and at times violent waters.