“Wound Mending Time and Attention”

When artists create opportunities for support and mutual aid rather than unquestioningly competing with one another for meager resources, they open a small space of resistance to the divisiveness that comes from an economically precarious existence. The brainchild of Caroline Woolard, a sculptor and social-practice organizer who has initiated various barter-based endeavors in New York, and curated by Stamatina Gregory, this group exhibition with work by seventeen artists and collectives is meant to be the first incarnation of Wound, a membership-based study center whose name suggests the activity of setting a clock. Attention and time, two things atomized by digital technology, are the focus of the objects displayed on the walls and tables and in the vitrines. Some works are text pieces, like Dave McKenzie’s painting, which reads: THIS PAINTING IS A PROPOSAL. I PROPOSE WE MEET ONCE A YEAR EVERY YEAR UNTIL ONE OF US CAN’T OR WON’T. Judith Leemann shows altered chess pieces and talismanic objects that she uses in her practice to explore nonlinguistic forms of expression. Taraneh Fazeli, a member of Canaries (a network of creative people living with autoimmune and other chronic illnesses), presents several incarnations of her multipart project “Sick Time,” which involves workshops that address care and empathy; the displays here include drawings made during a workshop at Houston’s Project Row Houses. An accompanying program of events at 41 Cooper Gallery includes sessions with the activist collective Ultra-red, whose work with sound and electronic music explores the political dimension of listening. —Cathy Lebowitz

Pictured: Dave McKenzie: Proposal, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 16 by 16 inches.