Judith Leemann: current projects

Preposition and prosthesis is a new work made for the exhibition Resonating Bodies, curated by Shannon Stratton for The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN and featuring work by Sara Black & Jillian Soto, Ben Fain, Conrad Freiburg, Kelly Kaczynski, and Judith Leemann. June 15 - August 11, 2013.

The galleries housing the four large works that are the core of the Resonating Bodies exhibition (by Black/Soto, Fain, Freiburg, and Kaczynski) will also house a smaller parasitic entity, a dispersed visual glossary of kinds. This work, preposition and prosthesis, consists of twenty-five wordless explanations, videos in which hands moving objects seek to demonstrate an essentialized typology of ways in which one thing may be seen to participate in another. Taking its imperative from the figure of the parasite, the work builds itself entirely out of the language, materials, colors, and strategies already at play within the work of the other artists in the exhibition. The videos are hosted online, accessed through a host of sixteen seats whose slipcovers are patterned with QR codes leading to the videos.

This work builds on previous experiments in producing wordless didactics (Hairy Blob, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, 2012) and in using object-based explanations with groups of social justice activists as a means of interrupting habitual modes of explanation and moving towards a relational/systemic understanding of complex social phenomena (Artist in Residence, Design Studio for Social Intervention, Boston, 2009-present).