DOCUMENT

DOCUMENT Chicago is pleased to present Beginner's Mind, a solo exhibition of 108 paintings on Indian cotton paper, a video, and two maps by Portuguese artist Pedro Vaz (b. Maputo, Mozambique, 1977). Pedro Vaz’s exhibition Beginner’s Mind began long before he conceived it. One could say its origins trace back thirty-five years, to 1991, when artist Rui Calçada Bastos, then twenty years old, set out on a trek through the Indian Himalayas—an experience that later gave rise to the photographic series Paisagem para Desaparecidos II (“Landscape for the Disappeared II”, 2018). But its roots stretch even deeper, to the formation of the mountains themselves over 45 million years ago—peaks near Ladakh that have never ceased to shift and evolve. It’s a long story that unfolds at the crossroads of geology and art, religion and landscape, humanity and nature. Pedro Vaz is a wanderer. His practice aligns with the tradition of land art, particularly echoing the work of British artists Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, who, since the 1960s, have traversed vast landscapes across the globe, distilling their journeys into works of profound poetic resonance. In this way, Pedro Vaz and his paintings of Ladakh’s surrounding peaks—Saser Kangri (25,171 ft) and Nun (23,409 ft)—are not separate. Just as these mountains are in constant motion, so too are the images he captures, first through photography and video, and later in their transformation into paintings and video installations.

The exhibition builds upon and expands the themes of investigation explored in the Exhibit A group exhibition in 2024. Bending the limits of traditional media, repeating patterns and shapes, and referencing the history of art, literature, and cultures are some of the aspects which bring together the artists on view as well as DOCUMENT’s program at large.

DOCUMENT is delighted to present Beyond purpose, Anneke Eussen’s second solo show with the gallery, opening November 1, 2024. Anneke Eussen utilizes the formal principles of Minimalism evoking geometric seriality, yet quietly deploys hidden narratives and secret histories in her work. Her practice revolves around cultivating and repurposing found materials into meticulously detailed and ghostly wall sculptures. Through layering, arrangement, and assembly interventions, Eussen is never manipulating the original shape of the objects and insists on using their original framework. Through overlapping industrial materials such as stone, glass, and metal, Eussen questions the linguistic and political construction of borders. The works emanate the tangibility of human contact, visualizing the sensuous connection between past, present, and future through our relationship with built space. Anneke Eussen (born 1978, Netherlands) lives and works in Vaals, Netherlands. She studied at the Academy of Maastricht, Netherlands, followed by a post-graduate residency at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium. Solo exhibitions include Tatjana Pieters (forthcoming), Antwerp, Belgium; Kunstverein Schwerin, Germany; DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL; Marinaro, New York, NY; Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Belgium; Cruise&Callas, Berlin, Germany; LSD Galerie, Berlin, Germany; and Highlight Gallery, San Francisco, CA. She has participated in group exhibitions including Horizonverticaal, Haarlem, Netherlands; HISK, Antwerpen, Belgium; DMW gallery, Antwerp, Belgium; and Lage Egal, Berlin, Germany; Park Platform for Visual Arts, Tilburg, Netherlands; and Fondation Villa Datris, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France.

Erin Jane Nelson’s new body of work centers around a series of ceramic pinhole cameras and their resulting images. Painted in moody glazes and fashioned into abstractions of mythical creatures and animals, the sculptural cameras employ a centuries-old form of proto-photography as Nelson takes them into the landscape to make images. The show’s title, Undersight, is a colloquial term for the condition of sousveillance, which refers to the art and technology of fostering a more personal, civic form of image production from the lens of “underneath” and an intimate human hand, rather than the “eye in the sky” imaging that monitors everything. By using elements of the material earth and cosmos (clay, light, air particles) to produce photographic impressions of the land, relationships to it, and to each other, Nelson’s cameras do not shoot or capture, but gather and refract. In turn, the exhibition entertains the disobedient belief “that the earth makes itself” and dictates the terms of its own picturing. For over a decade, Nelson’s practice has incorporated many uses and abuses of photography: ultrasounds, nanny cams, flatbed scans, polaroids, magazine clippings, and stickers. These images are then printed on fabric, or embedded in inscrutable ceramic objects resembling memorial placards, teen bedroom collages, and vernacular Southern craft where she grew up and currently resides. Her ceramic sculptures, often wall-based, have previously served as supports, or a context for her images, which document sites of ecological devastation through the lens of personal anecdotes, local lore, and femme signifiers like flowers and hearts. In a nuanced departure, the images that animate this show are not only affixed to surfaces but emerge from within the object itself: sun rays focused into loving recordings of ethereal swamplands and poppy fields and friends on picnic blankets, hazy and evanescent. Printed sepia-tones or black and white with the patina of early Instagram filters and emo high school dark room photography—and embedded in mottled ceramic frames like slabs of sediment flattened over ages or stone tablets baring religious inscription—these works recall the recent-past of Nelson’s environs and more obliquely register far-reaching scales of time. In the Middle Ages, the dark interior of the camera obscura (a predecessor to early photography), was said to be a place of dark magic and illusion as sin, evidencing the devil and validation of doctrines of belief held at the time. Digging into deeper history, the cameras’ emphatic circular openings resurrect a longstanding archetype for birth, a site of origins, and the sublime. Some of the earliest proto-pinhole cameras were trees, casting fuzzy circular spots of sun on the ground through openings between leaves. A related apparatus became solar clocks, where the shadow produced by a vertical stick or rod in the sun, topped with a round metal disk for focusing light, could be used to measure the position of the earth’s most visible star in the sky. As such, you might say that time is actually an image or projection, and that images want to be “irrational,” like aura or spirit photography, recording and receiving whatever inexplicable information comes its way rather than circumscribing it. Imbued with the poetic notion of “reversal” inherent in the pinhole camera is the tool’s technical operation of transforming object and light into image. Both photographs and sculptures delight in metaphorically reversing the role of the centuries-old apparatus, used in the Renaissance as technique for “capturing” the sun moving over a long period of time, studying wavelengths of light, and translating “reality” into one-point perspective. For Nelson, this instrument—the camera—historically used for such forms of “factual” documentation and perceptual control of the landscape becomes, instead, an earnest device for picking up on the universe’s unknowable rhythms with play and inquisitiveness and longing for an unconstrained kind of seeing. People love to hate nostalgia. Beyond pretension, paramount to this aversion is resistance to the fear to admit that we can’t ever return to the beginnings of things. We’re effectively stuck, buried in debt to the land and an onslaught of images and ideologies of control. But even Theory, which hates nostalgia most, recognizes that only at the point of failure and disillusionment—of “advancing” technologies, or social movements, or just living—can give you a glimpse at the utopia anticipated at their outset. In this way, maybe the end is always really the start. — Margaret Kross

DOCUMENT is thrilled to present Infinite Like Night, Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s fourth solo show with the gallery, opening April 12, 2024. The exhibition serves as a site of exploration for Blue Studio, the artist’s newest body of work, shown here for the first time. While continuing his investigation of the studio as a place of portraiture and play, these photographs represent a departure from Sepuya's recent series Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio (2021-2023), currently featured in the artist’s solo show Exposure at Nottingham Contemporary, on view through May 5, 2024. Infinite Like Night, the title of the exhibition, is taken from Bruce Nugent’s surreal short story Smoke, Lilies and Jade (1926). Originally published in black literary magazine Fire!!, it was unprecedented in its explicitly bisexual and homoerotic writing and established Nugent as a new voice in the Harlem Renaissance. Sepuya's own explorations of subjectivity and identity mediated through desire resonate with Nugent’s text; in the works on view at DOCUMENT, studio scenes featuring expansive mirrors and gazing balls are presented in relation to intimate portraits photographed under a deep blue light. The photographic gaze and the queer body remain key themes in Sepuya’s images, while the studio setting and its materials often function as an active framework rather than a simple backdrop, revealing traces of human presence and the devices used to construct images. The subjects of Sepuya’s photographs are friends who serve as muses, collaborators, and intimates. In this collective form of image-making, the recurring presence and visibility of cameras, tripods, and studio lighting – all forms of equipment necessary in a photographic practice – highlight their role as a support to the artist’s practice. Reflecting on and opposing the traditional relationships between photographer and subject, observer and observed, viewer and object of gaze, Sepuya’s work holds values of community and collaboration. The images contain a memory – and sometimes vestiges – of concurrent activities in the artist’s studio, whether through the presence of pedestals, velvet curtains, rugs, pillows, towels, or prints of earlier works on the walls. Smudges on the mirror, remnants of touch and movement, suggest a temporality that transcends the stillness of the captured moment. Sepuya uses mirrors as tools to hold and layer fragments of images, and as a means to deny the direct gaze of the viewer’s eye. Prior to their kitsch resurgence as industrially manufactured decorations, gazing balls have held a variety of uses throughout history, in social contexts both controlling and erotic. Employed by servants to observe guests without disturbing them with their presence and as devices to unobtrusively chaperone young couples during courtship, the contemporary use of gazing balls as innocuous ornamentation for lawns and gardens is at odds with their past life as tools for surveillance. In Sepuya’s Blue Studio, the presence of a pair of blue and silver gazing balls offers yet another possibility of reflection and distortion, hinting at layers of perception and self-awareness within the images. Infinite Like Night includes three dye sublimation prints on aluminum; framed without glazing, their small scale emphasizes the viewer’s intimate experience of these photographs. In Gazing Ball (_DSF4516), 2023, three figures are visible behind a mirrored sphere on the edge of a pedestal. The gazing ball holds a distorted view of Sepuya’s studio and a trace of natural light – at dusk – peering through the skylight. The other dye sublimation prints, Photographing with Michael (P1270684) and Sitting for Jack (P1270836), both 2023, contain an elevated intensity of intimacy and forms of exchange between the subjects, holding cameras and each other or capturing their reflections in the mirror. Sepuya’s work is recognized for its use of brown and black tones as found on skin, wood, and velvet. His recent project Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio brought the literal red of the darkroom into the photographs. The color blue has presented a curious challenge for the artist before Blue Studio, as Sepuya had been experimenting with it since 2015, for his series Figures, Grounds, and Studies. An earlier collage work from 2018, Untitled (2018-048), playfully combines portions of printed images; still life flowers, figures bathed in blue light, and body parts weave a throughline in Sepuya’s practice, from his snapshot series Roses at Night (2014–ongoing) to the artist’s latest body of work. With his series of blue-tinted portraits, Sepuya confronts the rich cultural history of the color and its associations with sadness and divinity. Instead, he concentrates on blue’s meaning of the indecent and risqué. The blurry figures, at times overlapping, exist as faceless objects of lust and desire, and yet stand in for the exploration of the self and the other. Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) received an MFA in photography at UCLA in 2016. From 2000 – 2014 Sepuya lived and worked in New York City, receiving a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004. Sepuya became known for his 2005 – 2007 zine series SHOOT and body of work, Beloved Object & Amorous Subject, Revisited (2005-8), along with participation and collaborations in the re-emergence of queer zines culture of the 2000s. He went on to participate in Artist-in-Residence programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Studio Museum in Harlem and Fire Island Artist Residency. Sepuya’s work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOCA Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the ICA Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the International Center for Photography, Stedelijk Museum and the Carnegie Museum, among others. Solo museum exhibitions include Double Enclosure at Fotomuseum Amsterdam (2018), Drop Scene at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2020), Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg (2022), and Exposure at Nottingham Contemporary (2024). Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Darkroom A to Z, the artist’s most comprehensive monograph to date, will be published by Aperture in Fall 2024.

DOCUMENT is pleased to present the fourth solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty (b. 1978), An Audience, opening February 23, 2024. The installation presents a series of large-scale reliefs, female silhouettes composed from panels of kiln-fired glass fused with photographic images, alongside unframed contact prints, a method of cameraless photography that stages various permutations of the wall-based sculptures through form and color. Spanning the gallery walls to compose a frontal line, the works on view invoke a crowd of inanimate bodies—reminiscent of discarded mannequins, life-sized diagrams transposed from anatomy textbooks, forensic crime scene outlines or autopsy reports—a collection of anonymous and enigmatic figures of display. While the figure remains consistent throughout each work, different objects occupy the body or its surrounding field: magnifying glasses, yardsticks, sardines, an eyeshadow palette reminiscent of color checkers used in studio photography, among other items. Across these disparate markers, each exists as a unit of measurement, of how closely things can be observed or arranged in proximity to our eyes or one another. The exhibition features Rafferty’s ongoing investigations into understanding how contemporary life is assembled through images—not in linear fashion or sequentially, but all at once. Her subjects are conveyed through iconography, an approach to representation that denies a spatial environment in favor of the flatness embraced by glyphic signs and symbols. Across Rafferty’s installation, three-dimensional space is not being collapsed into two dimensions, but created from it. Vacant of details that describe the body, the artist’s expressionless selves creates a procession of uncanny portraits. In Glass Figure One – I Don’t Give a Fuck (2023), the translucent figure stands against a milky backdrop of powder pink, lavender, and pale blue. A pliant measuring tape, such as one a seamstress would use, encircles her shoulders and hips, while a rigid ruler is situated firmly on her shin. From this relief arises a series of codified incarnations—at times the tiles that compose the figure are assembled in the same order to create contact prints, in others rearranged into configurations that deconstruct the body across the gridded framework. Amid the unframed, glossy sheets that hold these pictorial echoes, we see the imposing presence of an afterimage in primary hues of red, yellow, and blue. The spectral presence of Rafferty’s bodies are collapsed into shallow fields of black where the original material used to cast the negative image is made more visible. While subtly perceptible in the reliefs, the inverse photographs accentuate the proliferation of tiny air bubbles embedded within the glass panes—the x-ray like reproductions create a field that appears like stars in the night sky. Across her practice, Rafferty has been persistently engaged with the grid, a ubiquitous standard of organization in our physical and digital worlds, as a means for categorizing collections of material culture and data as well as a method of control, surveillance, and limitation. The recurrent life-size scale of the artist’s lifeless subjects has manifested in past work through stand-ins of gendered garments: images of dresses, bodysuits, shapewear, and pantyhose. This is a feminist project—in place of the corporeal, Rafferty depicts the female body as a socially constructed vessel built to contain ideals through the transposition of projections and inanimate things. Read as references rather than realities, An Audience underscores the history of how figurative language operates in relation to text and image. In addition to a form, the ‘figure’ also expresses the anatomy of images—a word that borrows the terminology of the human body to describe where reproductions appear in manuscripts. In the expanded footnote of an essay by poet Lisa Robertson published in the artist’s 2022 experimental monograph Sara Greenberger Rafferty: Studio Visit, the author chronicles the etymology and history of the use of the term: “an object or image figures when it receives more of our imaginative projection that its social or mythic function would require,”[1] (my emphasis). For Robertson, ‘figure’ is both a noun and a verb whose meaning stands in opposition to the symbolic. The figural relates to an interpretation of history, while the symbol interprets life. Yet, the function of these two forms are evenly quoted in Rafferty’s work, in An Audience more so than previous exhibitions—punctuated by isolated scanned images, the quotation of objects and bodies are collapsed into a single icon. As much as the photographic origins of Rafferty’s work provide a context of how her images are read, the artist’s medium can be seen as exhibition-making itself. Following the artist’s past presentations at the gallery, Dead Jokes (2016), The Laughter (2018), and Views from Somewhere (2021), what can be seen as the subsequent chapter here serves as a continuation of the themes at the core of each project—tracing the ongoing impositions societal systems reign upon women’s bodies. The artist’s viewpoints are inextricably tied to material culture and unfold parallel to our current political landscape, each marked by pivotal moments of mass attention: Rafferty’s first show opening just two days after the Presidential election of Donald Trump, the second surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court Hearing of Brett Cavanaugh, and the third in the wake of the pandemic. Yet, in An Audience, we find ourselves reeling in the uncertainty of a world defined by unlearned lessons. This transitory, ambiguous character finds itself reflected in Rafferty’s audience, a vague and indeterminate assembly of spectators that we look at (as photographs) or through (as material). Of course, it is implied that they are the ones watching us. For precisely what and why is up for debate—nonetheless, the artist’s figures invite us to consider the desire to interpret any signification that relates to ourselves, no matter the purpose. — Stephanie Cristello Sara Greenberger Rafferty (b. 1978) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty has been engaged in work, research, and teaching largely around what she calls ‘comedy as artistic strategy.’ That is, taking aesthetic and thematic cues from comedians to create artworks that are informed by the aesthetics and practices of humor, but may not be funny. She uses tropes and stereotypes of comedy – repetition, hyperbole, thwarted expectations, undercutting, doubling, slapstick – to emphasize the individual in the group, and call upon an already both awkward and confident social body. In materiality and installation, she refers to monitors, technological products, embodiment, and the physicality of seemingly disembodied pictures as they traverse the digital landscape. Taking inspiration from expanded photography practices, she creates wall work, sculpture, and installation. She simultaneously crafts strong handmade and machine-assisted objects while eschewing dominant notions of masterful craftsmanship. In her career she has mounted over twenty solo exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world, including four at DOCUMENT, Chicago. Her most recent institutional solo exhibition, Forum 85, was presented at the Carnegie Museum of Art at the end of 2021. In 2014 she was included in the Whitney Biennial, and her first solo exhibition was presented at MOMA/PS1 in New York in early 2006. Her work is included in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT; the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, IL; and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, Hanover, NH and dozens of private collections. She is currently Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Photography at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Studio Visit, Rafferty’s recent experimental monograph, was published by Inventory Press in fall 2022. [1] From the footnote of the first appearance of “figure” in “Time in the Codex” by Lisa Robertson, Sara Greenberger Rafferty: Studio Visit (Los Angeles: Inventory Press) 2022. 215.

DOCUMENT is pleased to present Exhibit A, a group exhibition that brings together, for the first time, works by Elizabeth Atterbury (b. 1982, United States), Anneke Eussen (b. 1978, The Netherlands), Gordon Hall (b. 1983, United States), Erin Jane Nelson (b. 1989, United States), Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, United States), and Pedro Vaz (b. 1977, Mozambique). The exhibition will open on Friday, January 5, and continue through February 17, 2024. Borrowed from the lingo of criminal investigations, the title Exhibit A points to the gathering of material presented as proof of something. In this case, it serves as fresh evidence of the possibility of bending the limits of traditional media, as showcased by each artist’s practice and the fact that all the works were produced over the past five years. Additionally, it points to an extensive web of potential synergies between diverse practices. Lastly, this exhibition shows evidence of DOCUMENT’s commitment to a wide range of contemporary and experimental practices over more than 10 years. In the first series of connections proposed in the show, the works of Eussen, Hall, and Atterbury (particularly in a piece like Anonymous Old Poem) defy the rigidity of the grid by shaping unconventional materials. Eussen’s 2023 series Hold the Line follows in the steps of her 2023 site-specific installation for the GIST Triennale, where she intervened in the broken windows of an abandoned factory; these new works recuperate some of the glass panels while highlighting their cracks and dirt on a novel play on minimalist compositions. Atterbury, on the other hand, uses mortar, plywood, and glue ―typical construction materials― to break and add a manual quality to the grid. Hall also joins the web of connections by summoning architecture, through the arduous task of carving a wall of bricks and giving it a playful sinuous quality that invites viewers to interact by sitting on it. Jumping in from the realm of sculpture, Erin Jane Nelson’s colorful ceramic works incorporate found objects as well as photographic prints; her organic and lively forms seem to integrate and absorb these vestiges becoming a sort of archive of the contact between nature and humans. Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photographs from the series Daylight Studio reveal the mechanisms of desire involved in the production of images, adding a contemporary black-queer perspective to the tradition of photo studios beginning in 19th-century European societies. Pedro Vaz explores the tensions between nature and tradition through a group of paintings inspired by the history of the first scientific expedition to Serra da Estrela, Portugal’s famous mountain range; after his own journey to the Serra, Vaz offers his reflections on humans conscious separation from nature and what he describes as our will to act under that estrangement. Combining photography, sculpture, assemblage, and painting, Exhibit A wishes to celebrate the institutional and growing international exposure of the gallery’s artists, as well as the beginning of an exciting new year of exhibitions.