Yuval Pudik: Touching Myself with (Personal) History

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by New York based interdisciplinary artist Yuval Pudik. A searcher of origins, Pudik’s practice is rooted in his experiences as a dual layer foreigner: a naturalized immigrant in American culture and a queer man in a heterosexual male dominant society. Creating an amorphous ground between discernible and cognitive meaning, the artist commodifies and truncates vocabulary while questioning the performance and perception of verbal and visual modes of communication.

Titled Touching Myself with (Personal) History, Pudik’s solo debut at the gallery is a meditation on the afterlife of language and text. The exhibition centers on transcriptions of the Radio Dialogs, a German series of broadcasts written and performed from 1955 through 1971 by novelist and scholar Arno Schmidt. Drafted in the voices of imagined conversations on literature between a wide variety of true authors, Schmidt’s discourses were conceived for listenership; the book reads as a script, with quotations on tone, movement and emotion clearly marked.

Isolating quotes from the radio transcripts, Pudik meticulously rendered 69 literary fragments as graphite on vellum lightboxes. Varying in scale and orientation, the drawings are encased in heavy painted white pasteboard containers with hot pink electrical cords and labeled Evening Programs 001 through 069. Reducing the broadcast commentary into static impressions of light in space and a visual lexicon of references emptied from their original subject by fracture, Pudik utilizes words and notations as architecture to create habitable rooms where intended value is removed amidst independent interpretation. Installed on industrial metal shelves, suspended from the ceiling, or casually placed on the floor, Pudik maps an immersive terrestrial plane - the viewer experiences an in-the-round cacophony of pieced language while navigating a suggestive urban environment. In a soundless installation, the memory of audible conversation is present.

The exhibition also features a single large-scale framed work on paper, Hall of Records. A totem of neon orange flight recorders, a unit consisting of the combined flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder used to document the performance and conditions of an aircraft in flight, the work provides an alternate commentary on transcription, meaning and containment. A conceptual counterweight to the Evening Programs, Hall of Records ponders the perilous inaccessibility of an inherently closed system of dialogue.