Exhibition Review: Just In (Out of Your Mouth)

Around 20 minutes before the closing officially began, Buffington and Greenwell started to set up for the talk, leaving the social groups that had formed. The exhibition featured wallpapered and collaged images, predominantly images that, per Greenwell’s tastes, were no more recent than the late ‘80s. A few collaged photos were cut out and pasted, but most retained original, rectangular forms, placed into a new context, taped onto larger images, or wallpapered onto walls and easily movable panels just taller than the average viewer.

“When does an image become estranged from its consecrated purpose and thus amenable to transformation?” Buffington and Greenwell asked in their exhibit proposal. “What attracts images to one another when cognitive frameworks fail?”

The pair have worked on projects jointly since the late ‘90s, and were inspired by their collage practices to conduct the collage-installation.

Working together, the collaged panels around the room, easily moveable, were moved to create a solid-white wall, and a projector was placed in the back during the set-up for the artist talk. As the talk began, though, it became clear that the artist talk was not really an artist talk at all. Instead, it was the collage-installation explaining itself through performance.

Greenwell took to the back of the room while Buffington stood at the front. Greenwell began playing audio, mixing some audio live while working from a pre-recording of an educational tape of a man describing the differences between Classicism and Romanticism. At the front of the room, Buffington began the challenging choreography of taping images onto larger images and bringing out additional projector screens, at points working with three, four, and five surfaces, adjusting the projector screen heights, and taking down and re-layering images. As Buffington constantly introduced physical shifts, the projections also changed. 

There was continuity through the low audio being spliced by Greenwell at the back of the room, sometimes about Classicism and Romanticism, and sometimes including short audio clips from other sources, including ‘Running’ by Gil Scott-Heron.

Nothing was static; everything fluctuated.

Greenwell mentioned a need for artwork to speak for itself as much as possible during an artist's talk. During the Q&A after their presentation, attendees asked questions about framing, authoritarianism, time, how the pair selected images, and how audiences engage with art in ways that can be both comfortable and uncomfortable, depending on where we stand and what we bring to the viewing.