Marc Kokopeli  and Sydney Schrader
Curated by Anthony Huberman

Everything has edges. Has contours. An object or an image always begins somewhere and ends somewhere else, rubbing into whatever is nearby on either side. These edges indicate the area where something meets its own exterior, its points of contact with all that it isn’t.

By “everything” I mean not just objects and images but sounds, bodies, colors, words, ideologies, ideas.  And by “edges,” I don’t just mean physical ones but conceptual, political, or emotional ones as well. These are not firm borders but the endlessly shifting set of parameters that we use to distinguish one object, idea, agenda, or emotion from another.

An artist’s work, or at least one way to think about an artist’s work, is to sharpen these edges and rub one into another in ways that make each one bend, shift, or vibrate. Duchamp, for example, looked at the edges that separate “art” from “not-art” and made artworks that re-adjusted what both might mean. Rothko looked at red and orange. Caravaggio looked at light and dark. Giotto looked at the human and the divine.

To sharpen an edge doesn’t necessarily mean juxtaposing opposing or disparate elements but it also can also involve cutting something open—inserting a wedge into a form (or an idea) that had previously seemed monolithic, or at least whole or intact, in order to create a new perimeter, a different geography, a newfound vulnerability, like an ax splitting up a log.

One way to describe It’s a Pink Area, an exhibition of new and existing works by New York-based artists Marc Kokopeli and Sydney Schrader, is to say that it’s made of edges and wedges. Alien objects have been inserted into familiar places, creating different geographies and newfound vulnerabilities. They create a kind of pink area, where the sharpened edges of sculpture, video, bodies, technologies, the miraculous, and the mundane seem to coalesce, intersect, or dig into each other, like pieces of splintered wood. These are artworks that pry things open.