Jeffrey Uslip is the Curator-At-Large of LA><ART, Los Angeles. Most recently he curated Leslie Hewitt: Make It Plain and Lovett/Codagnone: Driven By Love at LA><ART, November at Harris Lieberman, Francesca DiMattio at Salon 94, Log Cabin at Artists Space and co-curated Civil Restitutions with Simon Preston at Thomas Dane, London.
Ian Arenas' diverse artistic practice centers on sociological concerns in the realm of visual culture. In his Seminal Texts Projection Series, Arenas creates photographs by first projecting text phrases onto abandoned buildings and natural rock formations. Once the text is superimposed onto the terrain, Arenas uses slide film to photographically document the composed scene. The final work is a slide projection of a photographed slide projection. This high degree of disengagement—three times removed from the original action—physically manifests notions of isolation, dislocation, and relocation. Arenas projects mundane quotations — "I Really Didn't Plan This Out Too Well" and "Usually When I See Someone I Know I Just Put My Head Down And Keep Walking" — to convey the ubiquity of such transient sentiments.
For his sculpture "The Quality of Having No Useful Result," Arenas constructed a metal text-based relief with the line "Words Moved" incised in a cursive font. The viewer is encouraged to interact with this artwork, literally shifting sections of the letters to either spell the phrase "Words Moved" or "Moved Words." Here, Arenas exposes the transience and limitations of language in a pluralistic society. "The Quality of Having No Useful Result" elucidates how context is often created though rearrangement and how content is often easily massaged into misrepresentation. Unlocking the permutation of language is key to Arenas' work. Although the possibility of rearrangement is available to any viewer, there are only two possible options here, illustrating the limitations of individuality and innovation.
