Drop Out

Theodore Darst, Adem Elahel, Lauren Fejarang, Aks Misyuta, Barry Stone, Ben Charles Weiner, Nick van Woert

Curated by Andrew Woolbright

Rotation 1

Press Release

In 2011, the FBI auctioned off the tools found at Ted Kaczynski’s cabin in Lincoln, Montana. The artist Nick van Woert bought them, and began making metal casts. The copies of the Unabomber’s hand-made tools, haunting in their uncanny utilitarian design, allow us to linger and question what gets lost and what stays in the translation; letting us consider the innocent tools that cultivated a murderer’s project from a near distance.

Drop Out is an acknowledgment of the moral complexity of retreat; the strange and shared fixation of leaving society that is shared by both the progressive and regressive ends of society. It is an experiment in creating a recognizable portrait of an artist by imagining their poetic fantasy of dropping out of culture, while understanding that the same impulse exists within the far right and doomsday prepper communities. It is imagining an artist’s cabin in the woods, a place of retreat to the affective and tactile sensations the artist would keep as their last connections to society. It is a sensory map, a series of objects, paintings, and photographs that have memory and deliver something tangible and resonant for the artist to live with in a confined space. The aim of this exhibit is to question our dependence on art as a romantic necessity for keeping us human, while also questioning the fantasy of rejecting the society and art market that we critique (“I should quit and just become a farmer somewhere. I’ll be at the studio tomorrow”) The aim of this project is to cultivate the gesture that yearns for the intimacy of isolation and dropping out, while also acknowledging that the act itself is morally neutral and is shared by counter ideologies - the performative, utopic fantasy of both romantics and radicals.