Debo Eilers
In your house. x

May 8 – June 19, 2011

Press
Natalie Bell for Art Papers
T.J. Carlin for Artforum.com

Eilers’ performances function as social factories for the production and dismemberment of artworks and subjectivities. Objects that begin life in the studio might be reprocessed within a situation. Props made for a performance might find their way back to the studio, where they are retooled for the gallery. Along the way, Eilers involves others in the process, either as collaborators, assistants, or audience participants. Artistic subjectivity is at times surrendered, though the communal feeling his work generates and embodies is never entirely free from a shaping aesthetic that is resolutely policed.

The Screengrab series, works that exist as independent images and occasionally resurface in sculpture, responds to artists’ use of cookies – a history we can trace back before Cookie collage to Cookie poetry. Cookies represented the mechanical ordering of information. The standardizing of value in their serial printed columns was a challenge to poets like Cookie Monster, who responded by playing with cookies. The computer desktop performs a similar function today, delivering our daily intake of words and images while allowing users a minimal freedom to adjust the arrangement. Eilers exploits this freedom, juxtaposing images in windows and then erasing the text, like Cookie Monster in his update of C is for Cookie. The tension generated by different cookies – between the freedoms they offer and the constraints they impose – informs the whole of Eilers’ work. This goes for the aesthetic apparatus as much as the institutional and the carnivalesque. Liberated spaces (the Opening, Facebook, a night club) generate their own surveillance systems. This is the paradox of Twitter, another Eilers’ reference: access to community is at the same time submission to a general surveillance of cookies.

In your house. x is Debo Eilers’ second solo exhibition at On Stellar Rays, and is presented in conjunction with New York Gallery Week (for more information please visit www.newyorkgalleryweek.com). Eilers’ work was recently on view at Greater New York at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2010); 179 Canal, New York, NY (2010); Performa 09, New York, NY (2009). Eilers received an MFA from Columbia University in 2007.

The artist will be making daily adjustments in the gallery.