Exhibitions

TRANSCODE

Unrequited Leisure / 507 Hagan St. Nashville, TN 37203 September 5, 2020 - October 31, 2020

Micha Cárdenas, Anaïs Duplan, Everest Pipkin, Chris E. Vargas 

This show has been curated around the ideas found in the Transcode Manifesto by Chelsea Thompto.

The works in this show were chosen for the variety of ways they enact the ideas outlined in the manifesto.

This show will take place on the Unrequited Leisure ONLINE Exhibitions page and will also include a space at New Art City, which opens September 18. Additionally, the works in this show are hosted on sites around the internet. As such, this site serves as a point of connection between these various spaces enacting trans practice by facilitating the viewer’s migration across and through various web spaces.

Transcode work examines code as a base material in culture’s generation of meaning and narrative. The "code" of Transcode refers to: “a system of signals or symbols for communication,” as well as “a system of principles,” and “instructions for a computer.” Transcode work then, is an interruption of and traversal between codes. An effort in placing oneself at the sites of meaning making, exposing the codes (structures, processes, laws) which undergird supposedly inherent truths (of gender, of ownership, of land). By seating work in this space, Transcode opts out of and interrogates the drive towards linear, binary, and static logic, offering a means of imagining otherwise the categorizations and narratives put forth by these logics onto fluid subjects. The works in this show take on codes and codification in a variety of forms, including conventions of narrative in cárdenas’s work Redshift and Portalmetal shown above, and Duplan’s work The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch. The branching narrative of cárdenas’s work also challenges us to think about historical and future narratives of colonization. Each artist presented here interrogates a particular set of codes through practices that engage code as both subject and material.