Another Place and Time seeks to examine the inheritance of historical models of community. Through an attention to site, architecture and language, the artists in this exhibition address the varied forms of identification that constitute belonging. In a cultural moment that perversely oscillates between nostalgia and novelty, community is repeatedly evoked only to threaten its own collapse.

Tom Burr’s Body/Building series of bulletin boards relate to a recent project of the same name that the artist undertook in Marcel Breuer-designed building in New Haven, Connecticut. Juxtaposing pages from a biography of Richard Lee, the longtime mayor of New Haven who oversaw a number of postwar urban renewal projects in the city, and a 1983 issue of Straight to Hell, a seminal underground gay fanzine, Regional Dialectics charts a semi-autobiographical course through disparate visions of the urban imaginary.

Steffani Jemison’s Same Time works use markings from a script discovered in the diary of African-American visionary artist James Hampton—this language has never been deciphered. Painted with acrylic on transparent polyester film, Jemison’s work mediates public and private utterances, evoking a counter-history of language as a non-site and a means of withdrawal.

In a new installation consisting of wall vinyl, photography and readings produced by image recognition software, Adriana Ramić continues her examination of taxonomies of representation through their confrontation with machine learning technologies. Taking as its starting point photographic documentation of an installation that Ramić created at an elementary school in a small village in Serbia earlier this year, the work relates the articulation of knowledge to the shifting registers of diasporic experience.

Carlos Reyes’ sculptural practice taps into the strange emotional currents of otherwise simple objects. Here, Reyes has excavated a metal furnace from Chelsea’s West Side Club, a gay sauna and “social relaxation club” that also provided the found materials in the artist’s recent show at Bodega. Placed on a pedestal that has been wrapped in a tailored organza sleeve, and with the heat-scarred nook that once held its sauna rocks encased in a glass box, the object takes on a devotional quality, invoking an entire social habitus from which it is permanently estranged.

Another Place & Time