September 24th – October 20 2017.

Opening Sunday, September 24 from 6-10 PM

There’s a movie I cannot remember, that comes back as a sensation. I wonder if we can send an open invitation and ask what movie it is. (I’m worried about my memory. There’s very little timeline there.) Basically, I have an image of a creator doing something and simultaneously there’s another character undoing the same thing the first is making. Both figures unknown to each other, focused on their task, their actions work inversely toward each other, building toward their own ends, and at the same time negating each other.

The characters in the movie that you can’t remember bring to mind the Demiurge 1 . The son of Sophia (knowledge) emerges as a creator, translating into the realm of the material the world of ideas. He acts like a distorting mirror, blind, monstrous, some views considered him evil. Just like surveillance mirrors, he is seen as a distorter figure, but also as a creator, an artist, an interpreter.

The title, ‘Shredder’ invokes him, as the Demiurge is driven by, or is the id itself, passive aggressively reflecting and producing, unaware of his task. Pure pulsion and act. And as translations go, what the Demiurge reflects, is flawed, but that flaw is the surplus.

We can also think about the Lacanian task of doing and working with the excision that castration brings. Reality warped by it, bending us and, in that space of ‘lacking’ we find the emphasis on links that you talk about. We are a ‘lack’, and that void is the link between A-B-C. The excision becomes our material in itself, and an agent.

Love the idea of working alone, unmonitored, ignorant of everything else, even the mother. Well, we end up with the divine triumvirate of the 3 C’s (the Creator, the Creature and the Created). The shredder/ mirror/ artist/ id/ Demiurge can be thought of as the 3C’s—in these bulging ideas we always find the pregnancy of dots. There are toothed mouths/stomachs shining on the walls of the bay supermarket around the corner, an office, condo, etc. One looks invariably fatter there, improved.

In this exhibition your work performs a type of self-effacement. These surfaces are inscribed with random paragraphs, with shapes that look like graffiti, bringing the outside (the graffiti) into the private sphere of the mirror, changing the scale of the writing on the wall, re-presenting that sign, and in turn, occluding the gaze and the reflected. Mirrors without the other are objects that are dis-annexed, leeching on whatever, needy and passive-aggressive.

When we talk about your memory loss, are we talking about a generational issue or the early onset of dementia?

I’m worried. People don’t remember much anymore, you can search the web for what doesn’t make the cut of memory. We can crowd-source memory and ask the other to fill in the blanks. The more we can do this, the less we remember, obviously.

Perhaps because of the title of the exhibition, each mark you’ve made is shredding what emerges as language. One encounters a running line that stifles the democracy of reflections (or the lack of both). And whatever comes forward becomes noise, obstruction: a sign unleashed, unraveling beyond grammar, beyond language itself and becoming a thing. Or perhaps we meet in these surfaces, that are links and limits, an omnipresent mother regulating it all (Sophia), pregnant with the Demiurge. Delivering what reflects and distorts you. Sporting a reflecting belly, utterly charged with whatever crosses them.

Yes, the etching reduces that reflection by degrees with each marking; so, the reflection is reduced incrementally through the hand.

By degrees, I insist here, as these mirrors have a 160 degree field of view. They are and have a gloved sight, (enveloped, covered) they close-in on the filter. The audience adds something to that experience but the mirrors and the sculpture ‘chew’ away that input.

The mark/division becomes clear and concrete, fraying the reflection, opening a wound. Anything put in front of these works will not be rendered intact. This halving of the gaze cannot be held in documentation: we can’t photograph or film or pause these encounters or what they bring forward, this is a machine, precarious, and over-determined.

Here is repression.

(in italics, Kyle Chapman), July 14th, 2017

Text by Diego Singh, Miami Beach, 2017

Kyle Chapman (b. Johannesburg, South Africa) lives and works in Miami. Chapman studied interdisciplinary practice and fiber arts at the Kansas City Art Institute and painting at New World School of the Arts. His solo project Channel is currently on view at the Bass Museum of Art’s temporary contemporary program in partnership with Walgreens at 2300 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida.

This is Kyle Chapman’s second solo exhibition at CENTRAL FINE.

1 Demiurge; one gnostic mythos refers to him as the son of Sophia (wisdom/knowledge). In Platonic, Neoplatonic, Neopythagorean the Demiurge is an artisan/like figure responsible for the fashioning of the universe. We are interested in the tension that the gnostic approach to the term presents; as the Demiurge is considered as antagonistic to the will of the supreme being. His act of creation occurs in an unconscious way, flawed. The Demiurge is then, a solution to the problem of evil , since he is the creator of a separation, of versions or of a reflection that is unleashed from its source.