Truth & the Flood (Danube)

A collaboration with The Neon Heater as part of “Year 7: The Temperature”

September 14 - October 28, 2018
Opening Reception: September 14, 2018, 6-9pm

Agnes Thor
Andy Delany
Hannah Newman
Kyohei Abe

Setting the stage:

What does it feel like to fly? And how does it differ from drowning?

[Send out a raven. (The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.)1]

All this content and confusion? The clouds cover and the rain begins to fall.

[Antedilluvian (He was originally struck with the fact that the "theory of knowledge" as philosophers had developed it since the Middle Ages concerned itself solely with the appreciation of "facts" and the developments of orderly thoughts about facts. The inveterate belief of all mankind in myth, sometimes crystallized into dogmas, sometimes degraded into vulgar superstitions, was always excluded from the field of philosophical interest, either as divine revelation, which philosophy would not touch, or (especially in modern times) as a miscarriage of logical explanation, a product of ignorance. But the whole realm of mythical concepts is too great a phenomenon to be accounted for as a "mistake" due to the absence of logically recorded facts. Mere ignorance should be agnostic - empty and negative - not exciting and irrepressible. And it dawned on the philosopher that theory of mind might well begin not with the analysis of knowledge, but with the search for the reason and spiritual function of this peculiar sort of ignorance.)2]

It appears to me now that maybe the world broke quickly, all at once, but we were too slow to catch its meaning. That there was a very big lie, the biggest lie, the only lie...that made the world make sense. It was a lie that held everything, and once we saw a crack, we began to see them everywhere.

[We are a container. (For the man in the street, most versions from science, art and perception, depart in some ways from the familiar serviceable world he has jerrybuilt from fragments of scientific and artistic tradition and from his own struggle for survival. This world indeed, is one most often taken as real; for reality in a world, like realism in a picture, is largely a matter of habit.)3]

It starts running into our every day lives, it engulfs our conversations and submerges our thoughts. Where do we turn, where can we run? We start to purge those voices that are different than ours. Get rid of the weight, and we can hope to float a little longer. Every good story has a flood myth.

[Send out a dove.]

Truth & the Flood is an exhibition of photographic, text based and interactive works exploring how we exist and feel within a transition. The exhibition builds part of the stage for The Setting, the first part of a nine month series of exhibitions called The Temperature.

--- The Temperature is a curatorial project of The Neon Heater, an artist run space in Findlay, OH. As part of their seventh year of exhibitions, The Neon Heater will be curating a series of 30 exhibitions across the United States between September 2018 and May of 2019. A loose conceptual narrative will connect the exhibitions via a monthly framework that unfolds throughout the course of the year. The narrative is a critique of the Art world and capitalist art market, American nationalism and exceptionalism, and universalized Hollywood blockbusters. September's monthly theme is The Setting.

Other exhibitions in The Setting include:

Raw Hide at The Neon Heater in Findlay, OH
Lines on Map Mean Little to Eyes in the Sky at Southern Project Space in St. Augustine, FL
Different Registers at Camayuhs in Atlanta, GA
When the Winters Were Still Really Cold at Usable Space in Milwaukee, WI

1. Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News, March 8, 2018
2. Susanne K Langer, pg vii of the Translator's Preface to Ernst Cassier's Language and Myth, 1953
3. Nelson Goodman, pg 20, Ways of Worldmaking, 1978