Notes on The Selves

As the sweat from the summer morning dried on my back in a chilled and quieted Nicola Vassell gallery space, I attempted to trace this plural of “The Selves,” to find the parallel(s), the subtension. Yet, there was a strange frustration which ached as I walked through and upon leaving (and is why I can only write this about a month later).

The first set of works which drew me in were Na Kim’s portraits of duplication—repetition—infestation; there are edges of reality pressed against the topography of the ‘faces’ lined upon the north wall of the gallery. At every instant, familiarity flickers across the viewer’s tongue—”is that…?” “That looks so much like…” “Isn’t that…?”—and before the sentence can find its natural cessation, the tongue decays within the mouth upon the realization: it is not; the Self is not. However, Kim does not rely on the Warholian dissolution or absurdism of an individuated Self; instead, each face, each portrait is an approximation; it is an almost Self. It is always someone that can at once be recognized and realized to be unrecognizable.

Immediately after, I was drawn to the colorful pseudo-abstractions of Uman’s work. I was struck with something that haunts me throughout her entire oeuvre: recognition is a trap—recognizing shapes, disjointed components, objects and things and limbs and eyes. Figuration has always haunted abstraction; abstraction cannot hide from figuration and recognition. Uman’s abstracted works terrify the fundamental abstractionist with ambiguous ‘dots’ molding into ‘eyeballs’ and oblong lines and shapes becoming dismembered limbs and organs. As Uman diverges from the explicit figurative work of Na Kim, she still incites a looming sense of familiarity that feels unfounded or dissonant with the reality of the object-as-is. The Self can never resolve itself because it can find neither its grounding nor its sublimation.

After these two sets of work, I was able to revisit the exhibition and its many contentions with the Human proclivity for a solidity of Self. At every turn, there is an attempt to articulate, discover, and establish a truer Self than the day before, and yet, at the core, there is nothing solid. There is nothing recognizable; there is no antecedent for the Who of ‘who you are.’ Each work pulls one further from some concrete, comprehensible, originary ‘thing’ that constitutes an entirety of self. Instead, each work draws one toward a collapse of Self—toward ruins of The Selves’ past.