Raza Kazmi
Dread Circumference

January 31 – March 15, 2020
Opening Reception January 31, 6-9pm

Prior to producing work for this exhibition, I traveled the surrounding East Williamsburg and Bushwick areas and rotated a number of street name indicator signs away from their correct positions. The signs have both physical and constitutional dimensions. As structures, the physical characteristics of signs, including size, type, number, duration, and location, may be regulated by the local government of the community in which they will be sited. At the same time, local governments must take care that such regulations do not directly regulate the content of signs or discriminate against a particular segment of the community. Gestures at varying altitudes and velocities may refuse to negotiate meaning. Someone may be lost nearby.

When listing the consequences of touching, it helped me to know that subtraction produces difference. I learned that for each molecule of carbon dioxide that a tree takes in, it loses hundreds of molecules of water. Trees create huge negative pressures of tens of atmospheres by evaporating water through nanoscale pores. They are able to suck water up to a hundred meters in a state where it should be boiling, yet it can not because the perfect xylem tubes contain no air bubbles. Most of the water evaporates in this process, while the tree only absorbs a few molecules of carbon dioxide. Trees are made mostly of air and mass is gained from carbon dioxide.

Touch informs resolution and representation. An assemblage of graphite in a complex arrangement, reaching your eyes some thirteen billion years on. Trembling legs.

Dread Circumference is a network of citations supporting a kind of speculative non-fiction. And this speculation is in solidarity with a realist account of fantasy. Mostly the work is about looking.

Raza Kazmi (b. 1990 Faisalabad, PK) is a Brooklyn-based artist. He received his BFA in New Media Art from the Hartford Art School in 2013, and his MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 2016.