Quick Tiny Shows #01

There is a humble beauty in the way that Kafka humanizes Poseidon in his extremely short story on the Olympian god of the waters. In his illustrious manner, he de-mystifies and transforms the immortal being into a bureaucratic engineer in charge of checking mathematical formulations that we presume help manage the day-to-day well-being of the seas. What is perhaps most fascinating about this brief tale is not the fact that Poseidon is dissatisfied with his unescapable, miscomprehended monotonous job, but the fact that the Greek god is incapable of actually seeing what he guards. He is so stuck in the managerial aspect of his life that he has no time for the contemplation of his immediate surroundings. As designers move from idea to project, from calculation to execution, from budget meetings to fabrication mishaps, there is barely any room to pose questions and look back on what we make. Quick Tiny Shows emerges from such need and this particular presentation exhibiting monolithic works by Deon Rubi, Manasseri-Depetris, Ries and Rodrigo Bravo F. tries to craft that moment within a society that constantly faces egregious problems. Instead of directly engaging with such issues at stake, these objects bring about the boredom of existence, the heaviness of artifice, the absurdity of preconceived functionality and a certain naïve fascination with shapes. Ironically, QTS#01’s reductive structures show nothing beyond what you see, and I hope, as curator, to tell you nothing more than what you came with. If anything, QTS#01’s brute honesty lies in the fact that just like Kafka’s Poseidon, the theoretical moment never arrives; in other words, that instant of total passivity is as artificial as the objects in our show. Juan García Mosqueda