No Gains on Sacrifice

Wyatt Burns
Frank Castanien
Constantin Hartenstein
Nicholas Sullivan
Siebren Versteeg

With text works by Lewis Freedman 

No Gains on Sacrifice thrusts the unsubstantiated persona of poet Lewis Freedman into the midst of a group exhibition, where he conducts the viewer through his bewildering but incisive encounter with the artworks as seen in his mind’s eye. Although this exhibition was designed with Freedman in mind, the identity of the artists and any specifics relating to their works remained a mystery to him. The exhibition embodies the strategy of Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedman, whose abstract process of attempting to record the first letter of each word he hears spoken aloud is a race to separate words and hold them in memory without meaning, as an inanimate record of lived life, and a beautifully failing collection of the loss that time passing incurs. The poet’s writings and the visual works in this exhibition reflect various processes in reaction to a dream of experiential totality. The artists’ works reflect particularized strategies for the impossible task of digesting and representing experiences of awesome plenitude, of translating the ineffable (sex, light, pain, violence, infinity).

We provided Freedman with audio recordings of our correspondence with the five artists, mostly relating to the production of the exhibited works. Freedman then applied his initializing process to the audio, creating a web of symbols from which new articulations emerged, presented in the form of editioned prints and an accompanying booklet.

[Bill Cunningham in the New York Times]

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[Art F City]