Correspondences, Equations, and ENDnotes on SIH - Awnings
LJY = lisa jaye young
09/03/21 - 10/31/21
The END, Atlanta, GA
Dear Gonzalo y Estimado Todd:
Thank you for allowing me to contribute a little stack of ENDnotes for your correspondence –
• SIH or Spanish is Hard adopts the English word “awning” as a point of departure. That bright, bold yellow thing is called an awning in English. Say it 100 times. Ok, maybe just say it 20 times. Maybe just listen in The END as Hernandez and Schroeder say it for you, over and over on the soundtrack that accompanies this tiny but mighty exhibition. Awning, awning, awning, awning. This word (any word?) breaks down with repetition, becoming ragged at the edges of the mouth. It almost begins to strain the tongue and facial muscles. With attention and repetition, it fades in meaning and relevance, establishing itself as a question rather than a thing, in classic DaDa fashion, using nonsense to explore sentience.
SIH - AWNINGS
The END Project Space is pleased to announce SIH (Spanish is Hard) - AWNINGS, an exhibition of dialogue by Gonzalo Hernandez and Todd Schroeder.
G thoughts:
I believe that the project starts with a reflection that I told Todd about Spanish. I told him I still think in Spanish and then I translate in my head and speak in English. I would like everyone to know Spanish, it would be much easier to communicate. And I think Todd answered, Spanish is hard.
The collaboration started when I moved to another city. We started with more digital works and then everyone kept doing their own projects.
We exchanged words that we found interesting in Spanish and English like ¨Drama¨, ¨Todo or Nada¨, etc.
I think that working together is a kind of question and answer. Todd asks with one piece and I answer with another and so on. There's no exact pattern to the work.
T thoughts:
We talked about the idea of an exchange, mailing work back and forth through the mail. Which we did once or twice, but then decided to set up a shared drive that we could put digitized work in. With some of the work we worked on each other's back and forth, but mostly it was a dialogue, a call and response, also bringing in older work of mine with some of the spiraling text... A lot of it was saved as pdf files so I went in with Adobe Acrobat and altered and added.
Gonzalo’s move away from Savannah coincided almost perfectly with the initial shutting down of America due to the pandemic. Which added an interesting layer to the exchange, it pushed me to get more involved. We did an Instagram Live interview through a project that Gonzalo worked on for Laney Contemporary Gallery where he worked and where I show shortly after Gonzalo moved. That became fodder for the SIH project as well.
This then evolved for me out of the digital and small scale into my studio practice in general. It started to collapse into what I already had cooking. I believe that this collapse happened/has been happening/continues to happen for both of us.
We share images of work back and forth through texts and the shared file.
It is going/keeps going - it has no conclusion and isn’t looking for one
