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If in naming things we seek to organize the world and our consciousness, in doing so we begin to abstract. Recon- ciling that the quest for clarity comes at the expense of itself is one of the great tricks of living. In this sorting and stacking, rearranging and repeating, we find the breadth of our experience. It makes sense that the works here might be grouped together under the title, Moniker. Here is a word that means one and plenty: a name, a nick- name and, more recently, a new name we might give ourselves in our digital lives. Even our naming of that which is named becomes increasingly unstable when scrutinized. There’s a freedom there, an ability to shift and shapeshift through life in a unique way that only language offers us. It’s no accident that some contemporary “debates” cen- ter around naming and the language in which we might refer to each other. Each of the pieces here traffics in the supposed proffering of information in multiple forms. In this there is a certain opacity of generosity and, in a sense, we begin an encounter with poetics. Poetic, not in the romantic sense, but as words and images to order both the world and our discussion of it. Poetry probably originated with the goal to ease the passing down of the spoken word. Like the scores and decontextualized narrative activating the telephones here during the exhibition. More recently, but still ancient, the epigrams created and collected by Meleager straddle the line between sensual verse and punchy quotes. The works here bring them to mind, physically manifesting the facts normally left unspoken, as with genealogical information, giving shapes figures and drawing attention with the way we attach meaning to form. That we might describe it all as both airy and heavy seems apt, in mediating experience we tend to end up with a seeming all. Oftentimes the information we provide frontally, tendered as fact, is an ocean of abstraction. It’s in the christening of things that we might create and deconstruct order and disorder.

Text by Mitchell Anderson

Photos by Alice Speller.

With the kind support of: Temperatio Stiftung, Pro Helvetia, Stadt Zürich Dienstabteilung Kultur, Stanley Thomas Johnson Stiftung, Dr. Georg und Josi Guggenheim Stiftung