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The limit of authorial agency in particular and subjectivity in general, becomes the groundwork for a repeated production and reproduction. Flipside is underpinned by the processes of accumulation, displacement, and repetition. The register of screen-printed paintings, cyanotypes, and audio restructures the logic of their legibility and speaks to its limit. Flipside is a presentation by Sem Lala spanning Liste and Hot Wheels Athens. This is the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. 

Field is a set of 41 cyanotype prints, which will be installed in a serial line, one after the other, pinned to the wall, and aligned at the top. Lala made this series by picking out national flags with stars in them and then removing all formal content that is not a star from the flags. The result is a series of cyanotypes sequenced like a constellation, whether in relation to the other prints or to the other stars within the print. The stars trace out a gravity with the removed elements and—because they are clearly and graphically demarcated by the photographic medium—exist in tension with the surface of the cyanotype wash, which emerges as painterly and process-based. Signifiers of nationality move away from context, and, in this way, the series speaks to the contemporary ambiguity that defines the relation between the local and the global, the intimate and the most distant, ideological certainty and irresolution. 

The Untitled series is constructed around names drawn from an online chart of the top 30 American male names. Even though a name usually signals the singularity and uniqueness of a subject, these names are so common that they are vacated of their inherent uniqueness. This ubiquitous subject suspends the singularity of the painter and the primacy of his taste between meaning and insignificance, setting up a paradox that becomes the actual matter of these paintings. 

The name “Jack” is repeatedly screenprinted on the canvas and then, through the errors that occur during reproduction, an emergent variation appears. These errors are cultivated and folded into a system of failure that transmits an evolving message and mirrors the endless permutation that undercuts the ubiquity of a generic name. These delineated points of failure in the canvas differentiate what is otherwise a smooth reproduction, opening up a double movement that underscores these paintings both at the level of form and content. It is a movement between intimacy and foreignness, between Jack and the common man, or between indeterminacy of error and the impossibility of encountering the world without subjectivity.