2010-2011

NOT CONTENT was a series of text projects curated by Les Figues Press at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Part of LACE’s year-long initiative Public Interest, Les Figues brought together an international group of writers who investigated the ways in which language functions within public and private spheres and within the tenuous space between these real and imagined realms. How does public discourse construct narrative selves, and how are internal voices manifest as public discourse? What is unsaid beneath the saying and said within a silence? What is covered or uncovered via the incessant text around us, and when is a wall a law, a border, a protective shield, a frame, a taboo?

Over the summer in 2010, 14 writers (working individually or in collaboration) installed text projects on the walls of LACE’s rear gallery as part of artist Kim Schoenstadt’s Painted Over/Under. Each installation lasted for 3 weeks, at which point the installation was painted over using a color pallette provided by Schoenstadt. Featured summer writers: Divya Victor, Vanessa Place, Douglas Kearney, Johanna Drucker, Mathew Timmons, Yedda Morrison, Amina Cain & Jennifer Karmin, Jenny Donovan & Gabriela Torres Olivares, Christine Wertheim, Marco Antonio Huerta, Maxi Kim, Sawako Nakayasu, and Yedda Morrioson.

In autumn of 2010, NOT CONTENT moved into the “lost” spaces of the gallery, looking at many of the same questions, but through the lens of liminality. Featured autumn writers: Craig Dworkin and Martin Glaz Serup.

In the winter/spring of 2011, the project explored the ways in which texts—as narratives—operate within and around a gallery space. Participating writers created audio tours of the LACE exhibition space and gallery visitors chose which narrative they would experience. Featured spring writers: Amanda Ackerman, Harold Abramowitz, Teresa Carmody, Kate Durbin, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum.