SculptureCenter is to present the first exhibition in the United States of R.I.P. Germain, in the institution’s ground floor gallery.
UK-based, R.I.P. Germain investigates how structures of exclusion lead to the creation of para-institutional spaces, practices, and modes of sociality and solidarity. His practice explores how a lack of access to financial, legal, and other forms of state-sanctioned resources foment support systems that respond to the needs of underserved and excluded communities.
In New York, R.I.P. Germain will present a series of newly commissioned sculptures in the guise of facades and storefronts. Working at architectural scale, R.I.P. Germain’s presentation will expand his recent explorations of “false fronts”– or spaces that present themselves in one way but function in another. Offering an appearance of banality, they frequently mask an illegal operation. Liminal and precarious spaces of trade, the fronts also run as spaces of care and sociality. These engineered facsimiles represent amalgams of frontages for “baggy spaces” (as coined by the artist and the activist-curator Helen Starr), places “found in every city, governed by their own logics — market and moral, they function as ways to serve a community need that otherwise remains unmet.”
Aesthetically, these false fronts draw features from the vernacular of retail architecture, and to the casual observer they may pass muster, but on closer inspection they frequently sit slightly off-kilter to the mainstream. The dense layering of the facades – in terms of meaning, but also physically, with shutters over glass, graffiti over shutters, and overspray bleeding through to windows beneath – is analogous to the social valence of baggy spaces: adjacent, connected, at some points compensatory, at others adversarial. Meanings and usages compete for real estate.
R.I.P. Germain focuses on these locations for the ways they exist only for those who know to look for them. This condition generates specified ways to access and operate in them that cut across typical social hierarchies and stratification. In an illegal or semi-legal setting that is nonetheless frequented by a cross-section of society, the rules of engagement are the establishment’s own. In hyperlocal terms that interrogate what it means to be “in the know” (to recognize a false front, to know the tag of a graffiti artist, to be taught the codes), R.I.P. Germain’s work asks whether such semi-secrecy produces community, reproduces the destructive dynamics of the outside world, or allows for other systems of sociality and value to develop. By analogy, the artist questions the institutional and structural hierarchies of official, state-sanctioned establishments and how they reinforce social and cultural discrimination.
Related questions have been integral to the artist’s recent work, particularly around misreadings of the value systems of Black culture, summarized in the artist’s words as: “A hyperobject that exists in the mind of some people who imagine a monolithic, well-defined set of practices and products that are assumed to be understood by all Black people. In actuality, Black culture is harder to define, even from the inside.” R.I.P. Germain’s work has taken Black grief, mourning, wealth, music, gang culture, and hypermasculinity as objects to be recognized, codified, and reconciled with their reception and misreadings. His exhibition at SculptureCenter brings the artist’s critical and aesthetic hypersensitivity to New York City asking: how do subcultures function within wider cultural contexts?
R.I.P. Germain, Avangarda, 25th January – 25th March 2024, SculptureCenter, NY
Opening event – Wednesday, 24th January 2024, 6.00–8.00pm
R.I.P. Germain: Avangarda is curated by SculptureCenter.
