Laurie Kang and Chris Curreri: Unfixed

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Chris Curreri, "Handle," 2009

chromogenic print, 49.26 x 67.73 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Daniel Faria Gallery

Unfixed explores how the fluidity and tension between the concepts of fixed and unfixed operate as metaphorical and artistic strategies in the work of two Canadian artists: Chris Curreri and Laurie Kang. Through photography, installation, and sculpture, these artists suggest a network of connectivity between traditional understandings around photography, art history, and intimate personal narratives. The subject matter and materiality of their work indicate that photography itself creates a rhizomatic, interrelated relationship between seemingly disparate ways of thinking about our bodies, the political, and the social.

Historically, photography has been thought to fix an image in time and space, thus capturing an authentic record of an event or moment. Yet the physical reality of the process and an artist’s bias rarely fulfill those promises; what is left outside of the frame is as important as what is included. To fix and to unfix can be used as lenses through which to view the ebbs and flows of social tides.

Both artists’ work implies an interchangeability between all things: orifices are swapped out for one another, guts reveal themselves outside the body, lotus root and seaweed stand in for flesh and bone. Curreri and Kang suggest that there is an “unfixedness” at play in hegemonic systems, as well as within characteristics we think of as innately human, beautiful, healthy, and enriching.