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Freedman Fitzpatrick at Paramount Ranch & Liverpool Biennial

Los Angeles & Liverpool

Stefan Tcherepnin

Strautcherepnin: The Metaphysical Store (with Josef Strau)

Jan 31, 2015

Feb 01, 2015

In a 2014 interview with Liverpool Biennial curators, Josef Strau references a scene in the Terrence Malick film “The New World” where a young Pocahontas tries to convey the history of the American Indians to newly arrived European settlers through an elaborate dance. This absence of a written history confounds the Europeans, who without the formal structures (or ‘kind of hell’ as Strau put it in the interview), are unable to de- cipher the narration, and therefore take away no substance at all.

In Strautcherepnin’s recent collaborations, they include familiar objects which have been present in previous exhibitions to be used as cryptographs to overcome this impossibility of communication between artists, curators, and viewers. Integrated with new materials, the installation choreographs audiences through the next narrative chapter in the multi-year, opera- like collaboration between the two artists; Josef Strau and Stefan Tcherepnin. All is presented in one faux Western storefront, where object, the vulnerability of translation, and artist reclamation coexist.