| Summer Guthery: The idea for Analogous Logic was born over a beer with Douglas Paulson at Monkeytown. He described an early version of the porn txxxt, that txxxt that ended up being included in the exhibition. He had been added to one of the email lists that lead to an inbox full of porn spam. Gathering all of these emails, he found a common linguistic pattern from the subject lines through misspellings, repeating letters, and absent vowels. These lines were nonsense grammatically but their meaning rang clear—Short Hjaired Cutegirmls In Pmantyhose Gfets Scpanked. | 
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Lumi Tan and Summer Guthery are independent curators who live in Brooklyn. Tan is also the director of Zach Feuer Gallery, and Guthery is currently pursuing an MA at Bard College. The two are co-curators of the recent exhibition Analogous Logic, which was held at Brooklyn Fireproof’s project space Temporary Storage.
Summer Guthery: The idea for Analogous Logic was born over a beer with Douglas Paulson at Monkeytown. He described an early version of the porn txxxt that ended up being included in the exhibition. He had been added to one of the email lists that lead to an inbox full of porn spam. Gathering all of these emails, he found a common linguistic pattern from the subject lines through misspellings, repeating letters, and absent vowels. These lines were nonsense grammatically but their meaning rang clear—Short Hjaired Cutegirmls In Pmantyhose Gfets Scpanked.
Lumi Tan: Spam has become such a part of daily lives that we no longer notice its absurdity. In fact its very notion is integral to the theme of the show—an element of one’s everyday routine that requires filtering, weeding out, and sorting through in order for one to process relevant details and prioritize one’s duties.
However Douglas’ piece takes spam and pushes its irrelevancy to the limits. Somehow, we can all still read it, recognize its meaning, and laugh at it. Taking form as wall text, which notifies the viewer of its ephemerality, it becomes even more clear that this type of language floats in and out of one’s mind, as do many of the images and forms found in the other artists’ works. I know personally that once I moved to New York City, my once–uncannily accurate memory became overwhelmed by everything I saw, heard, and experienced. I couldn’t keep it all in my brain anymore. I found myself remembering celebrity gossip over anything I heard on NPR. And I think it’s only progressing (I myself would say worsening) with the development of forums like blogs, where people publish their own versions of the day’s news. In doing this show, maybe I was trying to make myself feel better about attempting to block out as much erroneous information as I could, to prove that other people (and especially artists) were doing it as well.
SG: Yes, sorting through the bombardment of daily news, gossip, billboards, flashing and blinking images requires a type of defense mechanism. I am constantly trying to prioritize what I can or cannot take in, and looking for new methods to block the daily din. Trying to maintain your preference hierarchies, to remember the name of that film over a celebrity baby name…. It’s frightening to think I can remember my nine-digit high school student ID number more easily than my math teacher’s name. A reliable system of organization is required—for me it’s a combination of mnemonic devices and repetition of information visually and aurally. Allowing it to live within several senses pushes it through the commotion.
The artists in this exhibition were testing the limits of more traditionally reliable systems of organization: alphabetization, graphing, numerals, and linguistics. They explored these methods with a fervor while retaining honesty and earnestness. Xylor Jane’s painstakingly drawn patterns, often based on mathematical formulas, are very precise but the slight waver of her hand prevents them from being austere.
LT: I think the primary concept that struck a nerve with all the artists when they read the proposal was the idea of "rereading" the existing culture that surrounds us, or that we cannot escape. Considering that all but two of the artists in the show live in New York City, where our shared experience oftentimes informs and creates the wider popular culture, there is a stronger desire to remake that shared culture into an individual one. Colby Bird’s work deals with signs that are fairly recognizable to those of us who grew up in the suburbs and then went on to investigate art in college, but he combines those materials in a manner that is visually striking, personal and foreign.
Or Brian Clifton’s table of take-away Xeroxes. It incorporates text from Wikipedia—itself a distinct but completely generic format—and is recreated each time it’s exhibited, rendering its sources unidentifiable. Though at first one could see the theme of the show as being overly specific, really it’s all-encompassing. So many remarkable images we encounter can be considered banal at this point. A few years ago much of the popular contemporary art was about fantasy and escape, which you don’t see so much anymore; we came up with this artist list really quickly, and so many of them fit perfectly. There seems to be a strong desire now to root the work into a quotidian knowledge and deal with these sometimes mundane issues.
SG: The desire to return to reality and what is essential was shared by a number of artists through their discernable process and choice of materials. A clear example would be Jeff Lopez’s A Fold and A Twist. They were so unassuming before closer investigation. These works were two carpenters’ rulers that were misshapen but still appeared to accurately measure distance. In an investigation of materials and a return to what is requisite, many of the works also displayed a minimalist sensibility.
LT: The minimalist aspect is certainly a tactic of reduction, as well as one that is able to reflect the “reality” we were seeking in our theme while simultaneously abstracting it beyond a facile reading. It was also an aesthetic that I didn’t really expect, in spite of the show’s theme. I actually imagined the show to be far more chaotic—isn’t that how we all feel getting through a day in New York? Yet I think the show comes off utterly relatable, taking the coldness of Minimalism and injecting a human element. The gallery’s location, in the bowels of a former factory and present studio building, offset from what are considered the main roads of Bushwick (a place that still feels deserted despite the hoards of co-eds living there), really allowed a dialogue between the viewer, the show, and its environment. Even once you got into the building, it was a bit of a maze to get to. I loved that feeling of serendipity. At the opening, we were all barbequing and watching performances across the street from a giant waste management center. Someone made a very flattering comparison to Damien Hirst’s Freeze show…a show in the middle of nowhere that was nevertheless well attended and critically engaged. Another appreciated remark was that the show brought together certain Brooklyn and Chelsea art circles that tend to be unnecessarily segregated; after all, we’re just trying to support each other.
