Nothing Selected.
Where nothing is selected, anticipation rules. The question is what will be chosen: what paragraphs will be highlighted blue in a document full of text, what files grouped together, what artworks hung on the walls of a show. What will make the cut? Where nothing is selected, press ‘command+A’ to select all, hold ‘shift’ to select multiple. Where nothing is selected, fate is at play. Things are somehow accumulating, one by one, by their own accord. They fly over or land or crash. Nothing is selected so everything is destined, it is exactly how it is supposed to be. Where nothing is selected, there is an opening, there is space to allow in. Welcome. Here, in Nothing Selected., Friedman and Ding open doors, make bridges and dig tunnels between materials, mediums, forms and thoughts. They are letting icons out of the screen and into the world, letting objects out of the archive, letting the three little pigs out of the story before the house goes down. The interests of the artists lie in the long process. The act of love of coaxing something seemingly insignificant into the bigger picture and making it feel worthwhile. They ask, where does it belong? instead of does it belong here? and then find a way to make it sing in harmony. There is both a relentless optimism in the act of finding such diverse things – a place, a shape, a friend to sit next to – as well as to the image making methods of long exposure and constant layering. There is a resistance in taking the time to make something, to spend time with this page for days, and in highlighting the relationship of art and art-making objects and materials. Where everything is produced and instantly delivered, Ding and Friedman push back by allowing old containers of pigment samples and an unusually long brick out into the light, alongside their work. They allow the personal to show, the obsessive, intimate and slow and as they evoke a sense of the tension between the private and the public, the myriad of images, people, and messages, they demand you to invest in the speck and not overlook it. They demand the moment where the torn and stained paper meets the clean museum glass, where the light leaves outlines of a snowman in a plastic frame. That is why here, nothing is selected but all is designated. Here, everything is cared for. Each splash of paint is allowed to count, each thought and gesture is allowed to count and that is where the magic happens. That’s where the friction between the cavemen’s flint banged together repeatedly finally produces the spark that ignites the pile of branches and sticks. We all cheer. We will survive the night.
Text by Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir
Curators
Alice Ding (MFA’25)
Alice Ding, born 1997 in China, is a current MA Visual Art student of the University of Chicago. She completed her BA in London´s Slade School of Fine Art in 2021.
@a.d.foreal
Boaz Yosef Friedman
Boaz Yosef Friedman, born 1994 in Guam, USA, studied Fine Art in the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in Germany between 2016–2021. His scholarship with the German Academic Scholarship Foundation granted him one year of study abroad, through which he met Alice at Slade in 2019.
@fawazboaz
Hours
Monday–Friday 8:30am–5pm and by appointment
Support
This exhibition is generously supported by the Department of Art History, Department of Visual Art, and the Icelandic Centre for Research: Artists' Salary Fund. Title graphics designed by Alice Ding. Text by Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir. Installation support and preparation provided by Anju Lukose-Scott, Yutao Qian, Ruoxuan Yuan, and curators.
Accessibility
CWAC Exhibitions is committed to accessibility for all our exhibitions. However, the second floor of the Cochrane-Woods Art Center is accessible only by stairs. To request an accommodation or alternative format, please email visualresources@uchicago.edu.