ENCHIRIDION: aisle, spline, resort by sidony o'neal (Gallery Guide 2022, PICA)

ENCHIRIDION: aisle, spline, resort sidony o’neal

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Portland Institute for Contemporary Art

Kristan Kennedy, Artistic Director & Curator of Visual Art Erté DeGarces, Project Manager & Exhibition Design Spencer Byrne-Seres, Visitor Projects & Exhibition Design Molly Gardner, Production Manager Kevin Holden, Curatorial Assistant Noah Beckham, Programs Fellow Israel Mota, Brianna Morales, Derek Franklin, Preparators Mat Larimer, Light & Sound Production Irene Ramirez, Muralist Mallary Wilson, Robert Epps, Designers PICA Staff: Roya Amirsoleymani, Artistic Director & Curator of Public Engagement Jakob Dawahare, Interim In-House Designer Erté DeGarces, Project Manager Erin Boberg Doughton, Artistic Director & Curator of Performance Victoria Frey, Executive Director Arminda Gandara, CXL Coordinator & Grant Writer Molly Gardner, Production Manager Jeff Hu, Facilities Lead Kristan Kennedy, Artistic Director & Curator of Visual Art Shaun Keylock, Accounting & Finance Manager Samantha Ollstein, Development Associate Van Pham, Interim Deputy Director Ashley Schmidt, Development Consultant Mami Takahashi, Programs Manager Leslie Vigeant, Director of Marketing & Communications Hannon Welch, CXL Coordinator This exhibition has received important ballast from a close community of friends, foundations, and culture workers from this region. We feel especially grateful to have support with roots in this place, at this time, and for this purpose. Our gratitude to the Oregon Community Foundation’s Creative Heights Initiative, Jerry Tischleder, Madeline Brant, Chey Kuzman, The Ford Family Foundation, Meagan Atiyeh, Stephanie and Jonathan Snyder, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their philanthropic contributions. Special thanks to Van Phan for her guidance and grant writing support.

We would also like to thank the entire PICA staff for all the work they have done behind the scenes; each of them has been critical to our endeavor. We would like to thank Spencer Byrne-Seres of Visitor Projects for his early project ideation and exhibition design.

We would like to thank the exhibition crew led by Erté DeGarces, who has been an integral part in producing this exhibition, along with a host of local fabricators including, Kent Richardson, Lindsay Kranz and the folks at Matchless, Andy Strange and Maryanne Erwin at Willamette Print and Blueprint, Christine Clark of Ninety Twenty Studios, Trent Junker at Castaway, Denise at Sound Healing Instruments, and Britt Howard, Jenny Greenup, and Laura Shirk Charles from Portland Garment Factory. Special thanks to David Boekelheide, Bill Boese, and Andre Middelton, and Friends of Noise for equipment and advice.

We would like to thank Adee Roberson for their collaboration on the exhibition’s score and Lydia Y. Nichols, Corine Labridy, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Sharita Towne for their contributions to the exhibition’s forthcoming publication.

The curator and artist would like to extend a special thank you to individuals and presenting organizations who have supported sidony’s work over many years in the Pacific Northwest. Jeanine Jablonski, Fourteen30 Contemporary, Ashley Stull Meyers, Melanie Flood, Melanie Flood Projects, Libby Werble, Sara Krajewski, Grace Kook-Anderson, Portland Art Museum, manuel arturo abreu, Homeschool, Melanie Stevens, maximiliano, Nat Turner Project, Maya Vivas, Orí Gallery, Intisar Abioto, Western Oregon University, Josephine Zarkovich, ‘Pataphysical Society, Linfield Art Gallery, Linfield College, Littman and White Galleries, Portland State University, Stephanie Snyder, Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Felisha Ledesma, Alex Ian Smith, S1 Gallery, Allie Furlotti, Maryhelen Kincaid, Vanport Placemarking Project, Jueqian Fang, Veronica, Michael Van Horn, Bonnie Paisley, keyon gaskin, Lu Yim, Takahiro Yamamoto, Allie Hankins, Physical Education.

The artist would like to thank Kristan Kennedy and PICA’s crew for their support in realizing this exhibition. In addition, the artist would like to thank their parents, their partner, and innumerable kin­­—including uncles, aunties, cousins, play cousins, nieces, nephews, and ancestors. We thank our guides and honor our homelands. Many names and locations not listed here. Thank you dear friends, family, and supporters for trusting my lore with yours.

June 4– August 14 2022 aisle

spline

sidony o’neal

The curator would like to thank sidony o’neal for their work and their ways.

15 NE Hancock St, Portland, OR 97212 PICA.ORG

resort

Land Acknowledgment PICA acknowledges that Portland lies within the traditional homelands of the Multnomah, Oregon City Tumwater, Walata, Wasco, Kathlamet, Cowlitz, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and other Indigenous peoples. People from these lands were relocated to the Grand Ronde Reservation under the Kalapuya etc., 1855 ratified treaty (also known as the Willamette Valley Treaty) and are now part of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde. The Grand Ronde people maintain a connection to their ancestral homelands and continue their traditional cultural practices.

Our region’s Indigenous community now includes descendants of over 380 tribes both local and distant. PICA respectfully offers this acknowledgment as a small step on a path towards recognition and repair, with the understanding that acknowledgment is not a substitute for action.

Interview with sidony o’neal

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By Kristan Kennedy

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Works in the Exhibition 1.

TANP D’ÆR/SPLINE + ELEGY Tyvek®, nickel buttons, aluminum pipe, plastic rods, 24 min. audio

8.

DEN + GUT modeling clay, rubber

2.

LÉSKALYÉ A LADISTANS KOSMIK cast bronze, patinated steel, found resin pool ladder

9.

WÈL WÈL marble tile, epoxy grout, rubber, pigment, found table

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BULLET HELL BNB printed Dibond®, plywood, single-channel video, color, 3 min.

4.

SHMIN FÆRMÉ ENDAN LISOGENI/POST QUANT SECURITY WON’T SAVE US silicone putty 5.

TOUKISHÒJ VIVAN asphalt, moss 6.

DRAWINGS ON TABLES inkjet on Gampi, rice and grape skin ink on paper, steel, acrylic 7.

PROPOSITION 4 GRIEF BEETLE IN SCENE (PACE J. TOUTIN) liquid chalk

kk: Let’s start from the beginning. Can you talk about some of the different nodes of the project—your touchstones? so: I think the title gives some insight. If an “enchiridion” is a sort of manual or poem to fly by, then maybe “aisle, spline, resort” are like useful buckets or forms such a manual can take.

For this show, I worked from internal environments, anchored by an uneasy relationship to asylum, invoking logics that carry from my being most recently descended from Black and Afri-Indigenous/Creole people. These ancestors have lived and labored on unceded Nisenan, Ohlone, and Tongva land. In turn, they are descended from people who have lived, labored, and are ancestrally home in Bayou Waxia, Bayou Têche, Atakapa-Ishak, Opelousas, and Choctaw-Cherokee lands. These are places where the long durée of settler colonization by France, Spain, and the United States continues to deepen and disrupt some fixed discourses of racial and ethnic personhood and statecraft.

The terms of engagement, synthetic language, can change rapidly depending on when/where/how you are and, of course, who your people are.

kk: How interested are you in legibility? You have such a fine-tuned interest in language and translation.

I am thinking of this thing you said offhandedly during one of our studio visits “When you lose the language, you have to make the sculpture.” Something there speaks to the layers of history, ancestry, knowing, and reading and writing in the show. What language(s) is this work speaking or referencing? so: I believe there are faculties for engaging my work that move beyond reading or reading...I am interested in the idea that some of the most special insights take a while to hit. Human languages are bound to humans and human time, and so legibility is a very contingent thing. That said, some languages featured in this work include the corporatized/state language of refuge and hospitality, algospeak, and Kouri-Vini/Louisiana Creole.

As for layers, there are some layers that, for me, are pretty well defined. I have been working from ideas of inheritance and construction, philosophies underlying some approaches to computing and mathematics that allow for many ways of creating and storing objects and information.

I’m thinking about this in other terms as well. Double and triple diasporic experiences marked by migration and the search for refuge appear to structure the language of higher-order mathematical derivatives and functional analysis. In this work, I try to study these different approximations, producing irregular objects and encouraging synthetic ways of being-knowing. These gestures reflect ways that the life of land and being-in-inheritance have shaped my own personhood.

kk: When we spoke about the work and its relationship to surreal math or novel math, you mentioned war—and wargaming—as it relates to the colonial effort to partition land and, more specifically, how your grandmother(s) came to live in the global north. How does this show address this after/math?

kk: Another sort of “beginning” is the entranceway to the show, which contains a sound work made in collaboration with Adee Roberson. You have called this piece an elegy.

Who are we honoring? When we pass through this transitory space, do you have a hope that something will be carried inside with us?

so: Not as an immersive installation meant to “worldbuild,” but as linked logics and simple mappings. For the book, I am writing about some moments from histories of mathematics and wargame design as they relate to settler land partitioning strategies in the global north.

Research from those spaces has structured a lot of my approach to object, scale, and presentation in this show.

so: I consider this hallway a sort of “aisle” or transit system that is an architectural addition to PICA. The piece is constructed to allow elegiac intimacy between two events I would like to foreground. One is the Natchez Rhythm Club fire of 1940; a fire made even more deadly by the use of FLIT insecticide. The other is the ecocide caused by France’s use of the persistent organic pollutant and neurotoxin Chlordecone in the Caribbean, especially in Guadeloupe and Martinique, since the 1970s.

As for war/gaming, I feel like so many of us are living in a wargaming environment with no recourse to asylum.

Even if we think we are “not playing,” and especially if we live in metropoles in the global north in imperialist and xenophobic societies—under every ableist, gender oppressive addendum of racialized capitalism.

Incentivized to reproduce and extend state violence, we simulate and integrate casualty in our daily lives.

Another component of the hallway is sound. Adee is a brilliant artist, musician, somatic practitioner, and friend. Early on, we identified the solar plexus and its attendant sound and color spaces as a primary energetic focus. Unmarked mossy graveyards, microbiota, and grief beetles haunt the score, which is offered as a healing meditation.

Can you feel that the simulation of a war is also a war? *This interview is an excerpt from a longer piece for a forthcoming publication to be released at the exhibition’s closing.