January 15th - February 10th
Apartment 6, Boston, MA
Apartment 6, Boston, MA
Anytime places artist An Hà’s poetic objects in the living home gallery of Apartment 6. The work perches between window frames and huddles on bare sills. Anytime inhabits the duplicated architecture of a mass produced apartment building and the instance of Apartment 6, a home built inside one. Each piece is a product of attention to ubiquitous details. Apartment 6, a gallery with the goal of asserting its presence as a home, feels like a harmonious space for the works of An Hà to declare their life.
The magic of Anytime is in a parry and riposte of translated materials. Objects of everyday life are collected, remade, and reposed into naturalistic scenery. An himself presents his work as sentences, paragraphs, pieces of poetry. His remaking, however, is not where the matter of the work resides, it is more than a model or a facsimile. Each object does have an initial ‘trick’ appearance like the fit of tried on clothing. Around and Around shows a cigarette spinning in a discarded cup, but the liquid’s swirl is powered by a hidden water pump. Beyond this first glimpse the objects reveal themselves as hand made, they insinuate themselves to be grammatical elements. Material is made readable by the evidence of its production paired with its ‘trick’ appearance. The entrance into this poetic world leaves an afterglow of immediate material malleability. It is more than what is contained between its hat and its boots.
A window pane of a building is installed with the appearance of rain running down the exterior. This disruption is so slight as to be passed over for a fluke of weather. Even with more clearly fabricated objects, like two spoons resting on a window sill, there is a harmony with the pieces’ surroundings. The works inhabit their resting place and become more than the space they strictly inhabit. Pieces placed within a window adopt the shifting view through the glass, they become ever changing paintings. This expansion is the malleability of Anytime’s poetic form. Once a word is spoken into the air it leaves the speaker's intention and becomes permeable to interpretation. Glimpses of meaning can flit in and out of interpretation. A lottery ticket offers a glimpse of a changed life behind the scratch off layer. A fake lottery ticket copied by the artist still offers this hint at first sight, it then expands to saturate them with the same lure of hope. Artwork living in plain sight does more than just renew attention to mundane surroundings. Living alongside An’s expanding objects allows them to fade in and out of focus. Each re-noticing of the works expands its inhabitation of, what outside of gallery hours, is a home’s living room. Attention ricochets from mundanity to specificity and back again.
With an expanded field of attention An Hà’s pieces unfold into an accumulative system. They take their place as grammatical elements the world of Anytime becomes legible. Its logic follows me and saturates the world with arranged quips. An’s sentences are translation of material into a communication below language, they operate along the logics of speech and thought but remain permeable undefined sign points in space. Discarded hopes, intimacy, and the flotsam left in the path of a life are not spoken of directly but talked around. In the words of An, “Living in a city, my encounters with mice are brief, usually never been longer than 5 seconds. I wanted to imagine a mouse at rest for once.” The ever-changing backdrop outside of the window becomes living paintings where hope and grief resurface and settle. As grammatical objects the pieces exist both as and within language. By learning to read the work the world at large becomes more legible, not as a subject that has been mastered by being constrained in definition but as a growing ecology of signs. To me it feels benevolent, sad, and affirms a great mystery worthy of lifelong exploration.
— Matilda Love