Jonathan Meyer : Holding Pattern - double bill exhibition
An exclusive two-part unveiling of Jonathan Meyer’s “Holding Pattern” exhibition, curated by Ciprian Ilie.
Jonathan Meyer : Holding Pattern - double bill exhibition
Curator: Ciprian Ilie
Part 1 - opening at ISHO Timisoara, 1 March at 6PM
Part 2 - opening at Jecza Gallery, 2 March at 7PM
We are thrilled to invite you to an exclusive two-part unveiling of Jonathan Meyer’s “Holding Pattern” exhibition, curated by Ciprian Ilie.
* March 1st at ISHO Timisoara from 6PM
* March 2nd at Jecza Gallery from 7PM
Join us on a journey through hope, devastation, and the intricate dance between language and meaning in Meyer's works.
“It says, with humility, without piety, that it is clinging to small hope. That there can be devastation without despair, and that the rage knows how to drive. Among these works are oscillations in scale and scope, in and out of reason. A throughthread poet searches among them for a joining mechanism, a stitch or suture to render the reticent. In WORDLY GOODS, a hexagon cuts short these phrases: ‘please just RECUT–– /SPARE the PLEAT/I’m BOUND to QUERY/I just can’t ADAPT to the practice of stringing—’. And wasn’t Babel a hexagon too? Borges’ Babel, where ‘there is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god.’ Where ‘to speak is to commit tautologies?’ (this is followed by six sharp raps with a curtain rod).
Reduce the works of Shakespeare to ls and os. Where CORRIGENDA goes un-gessoed, to follow, BORROW BROWMO to BROUGH––BRO. Yet, now gessoed, its illegibility tends to literacy. Generous subtraction, that relieves words of their tautologies, that renders the mighty name of a god to binary spindrift. Meyer, by mortisection or vivisuture, embroiders an obscured route through this iterative method; tenderness and terror are splitten up and recompounded into way-finding narratives. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is transmuted to quiet gilt. These recuts, of hand-drawn sudoku, word puzzles, encyclopaediae, botanical handbooks––an adapted practice of stringing––trace a thread out of the holding-pattern maze (or, into it, minotaur-bound) through lockdown and out of waiting. Is time spent, time wasted? If wasted twice, twice as nice?
For what do we wait? Our next mass extinction event? The bus? DRIVE YOUR PLOW (THE BUSH OF GHOSTS) maps our losses, a sketchy white cross over endangered flora, too-late-loved. Shrouded in tomb of boustrophedon, lest we forget. How do we do the waiting? With endless reels? Our times-tables? CHRONOPHAGE eats our time for us. These works are a guide to waiting, to the muffled past, the uneasy present, the sharp and shardy future. FUTURE FOSSILS (the wood that talks) are sure-footed, hold already incumbent pasts in their rings. Papered over with packaging like so many gifts, shining, resolute. The small henge of FACTION are speaking among themselves, plotting on their plinth some other path. If we tune our ears we may hear them yet! But then again, the wood will be just fine if we don’t.” - text by Lucerne Clay, February 2024
