In the present exhibition, Maria Petschnig and Benjamin Borden turn the sense-making regime of optics on its head. A current of under-determined non-events and reactions runs through their work, as if enunciating the impossibility of art’s access to the Real. Using a bodily, self-sculpting approach to video and a time-based sculptural process, respectively, the artists conceive of a universe unbound by spatial or temporal hierarchy. Here, the world is re-animated by matter without preordained concept or use——failing, totally, in both an empirical and an optic register, and ushering in differential possibilities of what is known. Moving away from the doctrines of the essential image, Borden’s Abeyance series (2019) is pigmented with industrial chemicals used to test for and predict structural flaws and stresses in the hulls of ships. These chemicals, generic material without a specific telos or determinable end, bloom automatically until the artist introduces electric current, fixing the image. Quantum in nature, the works suggest that what is pronounced as discrete, “here” (rather than “over there”) or immediately available to the senses, always possess a prior, dissimulated state. Put another way, the reactions’ end results also contain their former iterations and movements, and demonstrates how images can be haunted by their own ghosts. Petschnig’s work, meanwhile, crystalizes the entropy of the creative act. Petschsniggle (2013), filmed partly in the artist’s childhood home in Austria, partly in Greece, challenges the neat, spatiotemporal order usually figured by the filmic apparatus. Petschnig and her twin sister enter what might be interpreted as a series of tense, dramaturgical states: riding a mattress down a staircase, trussed together by mesh garments. Beyond absurdist film, the work collapses any kind of pure/impure dyadic sanctioning of Place. What remains is an empirical messiness that is incommensurable with any kind of singular categorical distinction: home is also an outside, sibling is also a stranger. When the apparatus of sight is understood as its own limit, our understanding of spatial and temporal separation (the commands of both the apparatus and how sight affects objects) can be figured differently. Borden’s and Petschnig’s works erode both over-determined, essential material conceptions and the illusion of the isolated place. If one vacates the apparatus (of sight, of image), what else might be freed from human capture? — Kyle Thomas Hinton, 2019 – BENJAMIN BORDEN / MARIA PETSCHNIG at As It Stands, Los Angeles, is organized by Makayla Bailey, Erin Calla Watson, and Travis Diehl. The exhibition runs from July 6th to August 10th with an opening reception on Saturday, July 6th from 6-9 PM. Open hours Saturday—Sunday 12-6pm and Monday by appointment. Benjamin Borden (b.1985, Corpus Christi) lives and works between Los Angeles and Brussels. For the last decade, he has composed and produced electronic music. He is currently a faculty member at ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles. Maria Petschnig (b. 1977, Klagenfurt, Austria) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent exhibitions include: Random Institute, Zurich, Switzerland; Callicoon Fine Arts, New York; IMO projects, Copenhagen, Denmark; On Stellar Rays, New York. Recent screenings include: Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Mumok, Vienna, Austria; Image Movement, Berlin; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. She is a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, New York. In 2015, Black Dog Publishing printed a monograph on Petschnig’s videos titled NINETEEN VIDEOS (2002 — 2015).