Sets.
Stationery, Throbbing.

Shinsuke Aso | Krista Franklin | Stephen Irwin


RUSCHWOMAN
July 23 – September 10, 2023

Opening reception: Sunday, July 23, 3–6PM


Following the opening, gallery hours are available by appointment only.

Please contact thewaves@ruschwoman.blue to make arrangements to visit RUSCHWOMAN during the run of the exhibition.


Krista Franklin, Fig, 2023, Collage in handmade paper, 9h x 6w in.



“My hot cheek cools, my colour dies, the heat quite fades from my limbs. The restlessness turns all to scorn. I become what I was bred to be. I become a librarian.” [1]


“I have always written, and even spoken, on paper: on the subject of paper, an actual paper, and with paper in mind. SUpport, subject, surface, mark, trace, written mark, inscription, fold—these were also themes that gripped me by a tenacious certainty, which goes back forever but has been more and more justified and confirmed, that the history of this ‘thing,’ this thing that can be felt, seen, and touched, is thus contingent, paper, will have been a brief one.” [2]


“Through the operations of collage, its main character, the delicate pink-and-white bloom, seems simultaneously vulnerable and predatory: at the left, its opened, flesh-colored petals seem to attract the red, liplike slits at the tops of the three black phallic forms that rise from the picture’s bottom edge; at the right, the petals—coiled slightly—appear ready to entrap any passing adventurer into their space.” [3]



With courage, solace, fabulation, and contestation, artists and their blades and the erasers and several many water baths embark on a reentry into the paper kingdom that is variously preserved and languishing in dormant pockets and collapsing libraries intermittently positioned within the social as portals of knowledge and crises of representation. The kind of surface puncturing and disruption demonstrated by Shinsuke Aso, Krista Franklin, and Stephen Irwin signal a confluence of grudge matches not only with the blunt, oppressive force of cultural narratives passed across history, but also the material means by which they been fixed, reproduced, and circulated. Image is here reckoned with—not only in its free floating, spectral qualities, but also the physical ramifications, consequences, vestiges of a pictorial space produced through cutting apart and assembling, rubbing away and erasure, embedding and coating. With these sheets under consideration, depiction doesn’t move across the front of a surface, but rather thrusts in and out of the support apparatus. In contrast to the myths of monolithic mythmaking, fragments are held, distinct, perhaps melancholic for their prior contexts, but constellated within gossamer fiber.

Collage is a glory hole.

Was a time when the imprint of one’s renown was measured on paper: ‘You’ll see me in the magazines!” Pantheon pages, along with indexes like phone books, ‘whack stacks’ of pornos under beds or on upper closet shelves. Celebrity gossip. Publications of record. Peer reviewed journals. That rushing somersault of data into information into knowledge transpired on the page, a kind of page that now makes something of a hushed exit. A more widespread obsolescence of print media is insinuated in the material descriptions of artist Stephen Irwin’s works on paper: “altered vintage pornography.” So will it all be; so is it all. Dryads shudder, both from a sense of preservation from being harvested, milled, transformed, and redistributed, but also from a mordant sense of detachment from civilization’s progress narratives, unsettled, concerned searching for where the inscription of that saga continues—off the page, into what we call ‘the cloud,’ into code, out toward disembodiment.

Performatively, these reconfigurations reconsider the cut-and-paste politics of imperialists and ideologues, swaying them toward new orientations and subsequently alternative ontologies. Derangement defies the authority of a singular, prior, regulated format, instead pressuring presumed continuities in form, image, messaging, matter, and the capacity to matter. Lusty, transgressive operations. Severed. Severance. Perseverance.


Shinsuke Aso, Untitled, 2017, Collage on paper, 24h x 18w in., Orientations Variable



Shinsuke Aso is a consummate cut-up who upsets diasporic trajectories by pitting infiltration and assimilation into contradictory paradoxes hung upon snippets, clippings, cutouts, and incidental marks. Within his layered pages, he incites a play between high and low economic aesthetics, blurs between East and West, and a sly coaxing of queerness out from the unassuming everyday. Often dismantling the entangled apparatuses of commodities, their branding, marketing, and packaging, Aso redeploys many of these elements, disjointed into would-be packages designed for nothing more than the tug of an abstracted yet undefined sense of want. Aso’s works on paper hold unstable and incomplete translations full of Freudian slippages and, latently, a nod to the violences by which composition and decomposition are enacted at the levels of desire, symbolic orders, and social engineering. Lively maps to nowhere, these neo-dada conceits teeter cheerfully along the edges of optimistic and nihilistic impulse, marking out marketplace implosions, black paint showers, and ‘solar anus’ sphincters gripping erratic stoppages within the modern day flow of information.

Krista Franklin’s work with paper proceeds from her many years writing impactful poetry, and yet it’s inconceivable that anyone could render greater differentiation between the forms and functions of text and image than what is suggested by the way she deconstructs depiction as a fundamental strategy of meaning production. This is due, in part, to Franklin’s blithe layering of funk over function: in selected works on view at RUSCHWOMAN, the artist borrows both imagery and energy from funk music as a genre, reconfiguring attitudes and erotics displayed in projects like the Ohio Players’ 1970s run of platinum albums with record sleeves often featuring Playboy Playmates who have been recast into richly visual suggestive fantastias of bold, freshly empowered femininity. Alluring and beautiful, these photographed women personified changing times with regard to gender, sexuality, and power in their original context and take on mythic, goddess-like proportions in Franklin’s reimaginings. The smoldering affect of these women is shared across excerpted source materials Franklin gathers from album covers, magazines, and other archival sources, loosened from their former contexts and made to populate esoteric heavens and subsequent semiotic downpours. Franklin’s paper works are always wet dreams for the ways they remember the baths in which they were formed. Seductively surreal, unapologetically futurist, these collages are populated by transfigured genies, arising in plumes and gasps, retreating into translucent veils of paper pulp, granting wishes, punishing, and playing inexorably with power.

A special inclusion in the selection of Franklin’s works of view is a small artist book made in collaboration with Ruth Ellen Kocher. Entitled Sl*tbook, the small yet poignantly salacious tome juxtaposes texts from historical etiquette manuals for women with a range of spectacularized images of bondage and S/m play. Challenging not only in the historical moments from which they’re drawn, but also in an ongoing culture war in which agency and power and control and submission are continually contested, Sl*tbook and many of the other explicit artworks included in Sets. Stationery, Throbbing risk transgression in pursuit of opportunities to heal, thrive, and propose fantastical alternatives to the oppressive systems by which our world is organized.

Stephen Irwin rendered his own eventual mortality ironic within the tactics of his artistic praxis. Prior to his death in 2010, he exorcized ghosts from the pages of porn magazines, isolating shadows, glittering details, smudgey points of intimate contact. In his best known bodies of work, pages once rich with orgies of reproduced images drift toward dissolution through various solvents and frottages. Erasure, usually considered a means of elision and exclusion, here performs sex magic disappearing acts wherein queer desire gently refuses to be laid bare for the leering scrutiny of heterosexist normativities. A striptease that explodes aroused bodies into haze and cloud and sparkle. Seizing upon historied, literary links between sex and death, Irwin’s breathy, blanched sheets are physical records of fantasy imagery withdrawing from view, as if introjected, as if incorporated into the hushed predilections of their onlookers.

The détournement of longing as it has been expressed and now distorted on the page rather trenchantly equates these paper leavings with time itself. Looping relics, broken from their earlier purposes now skim akimbo across linear chronology. They may just have well been delivered from as yet unimagined futures. Closed books, close bodies, chronological collapse, all along the shears’ edge in an operation that attracts and seduces a new other toward the imbricated fragmentary blueprints these artists have designed in anticipation of it.



Stephen Irwin, Crumpled, 2008, Altered vintage pornography, 10 3/4h x 8 1/4w in.



[1] Sarah Waters. The Fingersmith. New York: Riverhead Books, 2002. Print, p. 211.

[2] Jacques Derrida. “Paper or Me, You Know… (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor.” Paper Machine. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Print, p. 41

[3] Carolyn Lanchner. “The Later Adventures of Dada’s ‘Good Girl’: The Photomontages of Hannah Höch after 1933.” The Photomontages of Hannah Höch. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996. Print, p. 141




Sets. Stationery, Throbbing, Installation View

Sets. Stationery, Throbbing, Installation View

Sets. Stationery, Throbbing, Installation View

Stephen Irwin, Untitled, 2010, Altered vintage pornography, 10 1/2h x 8 1/4w in.

Stephen Irwin, Lather, 2008-09, Altered vintage pornography, 10 3/4h x 8w in.

Stephen Irwin, Fray, 2008-09, Altered vintage pornography, 10 1/2h x 8w in.

Sets. Stationery, Throbbing, Installation View

Stephen Irwin, Untitled, 2008, Altered vintage pornography, 11h x 8 1/2w in.

Stephen Irwin, Untitled, 2005, Altered magazine page, pin, and resin, 12h x 9 1/4w x 2d in.

Stephen Irwin, Crumpled, 2008-09, Altered vintage pornography, 10 3/4h x 8 1/4w in.

Sets. Stationery, Throbbing, Installation View

Sets. Stationery, Throbbing, Installation View

Krista Franklin, D*ck in a Box, 2023, Collage and colored pencil on vintage magazine page, 8 1/2h x 10w in.

Krista Franklin, Fig, 2023, Collage in handmade paper, 9h x 6w in.

Sets. Stationery, Throbbing, Installation View

Krista Franklin, Fire, 2012, Inkjet and collage on handmade paper, 30 1/2h x 20w in.

Krista Franklin, Contradiction, 2012, Inkjet, ink, and collage on handmade paper, 30 1/2h x 20w in.

Sets. Stationery, Throbbing, Installation View

Krista Franklin, We Wear the Mask V, 2014, Collage on handmade paper, 18h x 12w in.

Krista Franklin & Ruth Ellen Kocher, Sl*tbook, 2012, Artist book, 5 1/4h x 5 1/2w x 1/4d in.

Sets. Stationery, Throbbing, Installation View

Sets. Stationery, Throbbing, Installation View

Shinsuke Aso, Untitled, 2016, Acrylic and collage on paper, 14h x 11w in.

Shinsuke Aso, Q2, 2019, Mixed media on paper, 22h x 30w in.

Sets. Stationery, Throbbing, Installation View

Shinsuke Aso, Untitled, 2017, Acrylic and collage on paper, 24h x 18w in.

Shinsuke Aso, Question 71, 2021, Acrylic and collage on paper, 14h x 11w in.