Speaking Sentences Backwards

2023

A group exhibition at Real Art Ways featuring Paloma Izquierdo, Miguel Gaydosh, Matthew Schreiber, Laura Henriksen, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste and Dylan Hausthor, curated by Cody Boyce.

“[Haunting] points to the non-full, non-total presence of being. In every being there’s always already an absence of presence, an inheritance, a trace of that which was and that which is to come. In every being there is a haunting.”

– Ezekiel Dixon-Román in “Haunting, Blackness, and Algorithmic Thought”

The works in Speaking Sentences Backwards are haunted: by history and myth, by extractive processes of capitalist industry, by anti-Black policing and government surveillance, by conspiracies both real and imagined. They are also haunted by possibility and loss, by futures promised but not yet realized.

Through photography, sculpture, video, sound, holography, poetry, and design, Speaking Sentences Backwards points to ephemeral traces at the periphery. The featured artists look to broaden thresholds of perception, receiving signals through environment, radio waves, sub-bass frequencies, interference patterns—the infra- and ultra- ranges of experience. These efforts are marked by a fixation with technologies of recording and transmission—mechanisms through which the invisible or intangible is captured and represented. They are also characterized by strategies of concealment and alteration, through which spaces of privacy and intimacy are claimed from existing structures.

Image credit: John Groo

Matthew Schreiber
Image credit: John Groo

Dylan Hausthor
Image credit: John Groo

Image credit: John Groo

Paloma Izquierdo
Image credit: John Groo

Paloma Izquierdo
Image credit: John Groo

Image credit: John Groo

Paloma Izquierdo
Image credit: John Groo

Miguel Gaydosh
Image credit: John Groo

Dylan Hausthor
Image credit: John Groo

“The Governess” by Laura Henriksen
Layout design with Miguel Gaydosh
Image credit: John Groo

Matthew Schreiber
Image credit: John Groo

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Image credit: John Groo

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Image credit: John Groo

Image credit: John Groo