Some Spontaneous Particulars takes as its departure point a phrase in American poet Susan Howe’s book-length poem Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives(2014):
Often by chance, via out-of-the-way card catalogues, or through previous web surfing, a particular “deep” text, or a simple object […] reveals itself here at the surface of the visible, by mystic documentary telepathy. Quickly–precariously–coming as it does from an opposite direction.
If you are lucky, you may experience a moment before.
This exhibition presents never-before exhibited work by three artists whose research-based practices have drawn them to the work of historical women artists Marianne Brandt (for Brown), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (for Hinrichs) and Mina Loy (for Ritter), whose own production and memory has been overlooked or stifled within the art historical canon. Presented in dialogue with Beginning with the Seventies: Activism, Art and Archives, a multi-year project initiated at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and curated by Lorna Brown, the object-based works in Some Spontaneous Particulars demonstrate particular concern for a material handling of the past, as a means to query the act and implications of retrieval, the ethics of translation, and consider the radical potential of a feminist archive.