Something Other than What You Are

Press Release:

Black Ball Projects is pleased to present an exhibition by Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats, aka Camel Collective, running from April 19th  through June 3rd. This exhibition will be the New York premiere of Something Other than What You Are, a video originally commissioned by REDCAT Gallery in Los Angeles in 2016. Also on view are two new sculptural works, Judith and Hammer & Sickle, as well as a series of small drawings that the duo employs as an index to their research process.

Camel’s history stretches back to 2005 when the group formed at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Anthony Graves (US) and Carla Herrera-Prats (MX) have exhibited under the name Camel Collective since 2010. Their works in video and performance think through the contradictions of contemporary labor and value, and the myths of cultural production. Their projects bring together collaborators from a variety of professions.

At the center of the exhibition at Black Ball Projects is a 36-minute video that grapples with collaborative production, freelance labor and the constructed nature of reality. In this work color theory and the labor of theatrical lighting become a way of presenting a scale model of capitalist production and the distorted and contradictory values it seduces us into believing.

So says one of three characters played by actor Corey Tazmania in Something Other than What You Are. Rather than taking things at face value, these works (and the artists themselves) are suspicious of appearances and identities. Something Other… subtly unpacks the production of identity and one-dimensional thinking, showing the problem of alienated labor, the technical production of affects, and the labor hierarchies of the gig economy. Even so, the fictional characters are absorbed in their own webs of mis-identifications: with work, with contradictory values and aspirations, of “getting there without wanting to want to get there.”

The sculptures Judith and Hammer & Sickle illuminate the black box of the gallery. The works are constructed from modified century stands used in rigging and lighting for film and video. Their surfaces have been sandblasted, effectively removing any marks or traces of their use in production. Judith is mute with recrimination; Hammer & Sickle is a nightlight. These works echo the “ghost lights” that are left to illuminate the stages of empty theaters during off-hours to allow the spirits of dead actors to play.

Tyler Coburn’s essay “So Much a Medium” will be available in the gallery.

video credits — Actor: Corey Tazmania; Director of photography: Meena Singh; Theater lighting: Tony Shayne; Producer: Chiara Giovando; Sound recording: Andrew Storrs; Grip: Russell Bell; 1st assistant camera: Nadia Baptista; Video editor: Rodrigo Cervantes Ornelas & Camel Collective; Music and sound mix: Nate Harrison.

Something Other than What You Are was commissioned in 2016 by Ruth Estevez, REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles, with support from Fundación Jumex.

Special Event: Sat. April 28, 4–6pm
The artists in conversation with:
Samir Gandesha
& Sara Nadal-Melsió

Samir Gandesha is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Humanities and the Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, with a particular emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. His work has appeared in Political Theory, New German Critique,  Constellations Logos, Kant Studien, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Topia, the European Legacy, the European Journal of Social Theory, Art Papers, the Cambridge Companion to Adorno and Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader as well as in several other edited books. He has also contributed to openDemocracy, Canadian Dimension, the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail.

Sara Nadal-Melsió is a teacher and writer based in NYC. She holds a Masters degree from Columbia University and a PhD from NYU, both in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and New York University and given invited talks and seminars internationally. Her essays have appeared in Diacritics, RHM, JSCS, and Avenç; as well as in various edited volumes and museum catalogs. She is the co-author of Alrededor de/Around (Gustavi Gili, 2003), and the editor of two special issues on cinema, The Invisible Tradition: Avant-Garde Catalan Cinema under Late Francoism and the Militant Image: Temporal Disturbances of the Political Imagination. She has recently co-curated a show on Allora & Calzadilla for the Fundació Tàpies in Barcelona and has written a book essay about it, as well as editing a critical volume on the current Puerto Rican crisis.