John Roebas – Paid Position

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Comunicato stampa

TILE project space is pleased to present PAID POSITION (THE COMPROMISE OF GRIEF), John Roebas' solo show and the first project belonging to a TILE's new research program.
The project has been devoleped for one year through an intense corrispondence between the artist and the curatorial board. Messages as well as pictures became tools to register a story's construction, a narration within which we were acting as characters. Just as reading, expectation and trust pushed us in switching on the pc, checking the mail account so as to force the creation of an unclear ontological space of narration. It's here that usually characters take shape, building their presence by our necessity to affirm their reality. Umberto Eco told about fluctuant characters: particular entities who we need to believe in, knowing their existence as true, denying any opposite opinion.
In parallel, we started to think of personifying materials, affirming their capacity to act and be witnesses of a story. As recording devices, material becomes informed and therefore the narrative carrying each work. The post-narratives materials contain and the stories told by stringing them together within sealed vitrines becomes the greater objecthood of the works.
In particular, the exhibition has been thought as a semiotic system, where words and materials come into contact. Everything is conceived to play a character in a deeply personal narrative portrayed in fiction. Although belonging to a fiction, they act out as stand-in examples of a human condition. Since these are inanimate role players on a stage in an incomplete world, action is without consequence and time, stagnant. The actors remain the same, never changing, trapped in time. The dream space allows only reflection. The audience, voyeurs, can only be influenced or interpret meaning, for Act I never becomes II.

John Roebas (b. 1985) lives in New York. Selected exhibitions include Levy Delval, Brussels & Los Angeles (solo); Lyles & King, New York (solo); Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana (courtesy Neochrome Gallery), Turin; Jack Hanley Gallery, New York; Middlemarch, Brussels, Galleri Jacob Bjørn, Aarhus; Galerie Jeanrochdard, Paris; Bodega, Philadelphia; Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland; Centre D'Action Culturelle, Niort