Irie & Talvacchio Statement The art that is, and the art that is to come, should hang together as solidly as a mathematical demonstration, be as surprising as a night-time ambush, and be as elevated as a star.  —Alain Badiou Our work is premised on several related beliefs: that something else is possible, that everything is in motion and flux, that against the modern obsession with finitude and particularity it is possible to affirm an austere art of infinity and universality, and, finally, that there exist in-between spaces which, if rigorously explored and presented in their fundamental instability, are potentially emancipatory. We could not begin without these premises. From them spring specific questions in answer to which we explore a material possibility. Such questions as: How do we make something catch fire on the boundary between the possible and the impossible? How can we make manifest the malleability of our situation? What might it mean to suggest a new relation to the sensible? How can we start with a familiar object or experience and render it unfamiliar, not simply to “defamiliarize” it so as to make it “real” again, but rather to produce a moment in which the stability of its being is called into question? What is the real nature of the in-between space, and how do we harness its power? In working within the framework imposed by these questions, we have opened ourselves to a variety of materials and approaches, including sculpture, installation, performance, electronics, space alteration, and drawing. We work in whichever medium the given idea calls for. What remains consistent across this variety, however, is our commitment to a practice which is both minimal and rigorous and to a product which seizes the viewer by surprise. In our most recently completed work, we have been concerned with objects and installations. The Potentialities series (ongoing) introduces impossibilities within the realm of everyday objects and environments. To take two examples from this series: we have a sheet of notebook paper all four of whose edges have been torn away from a perforated binding; we also have a room whose walls are densely covered with paint drips which are dripping upward. In another recently made object, One Clock, we have a digital clock whose seconds digit ticks with an unpredictably stuttered and stretched movement but whose time is always accurate; this happens because each tick of the seconds digit is programmed to be randomly either a little fast or a little slow, with the net effect that the clock may stray from but never quite leave the “actual” time. In all of these pieces, we are interested in the problems and possibilities created by objects which are not merely foreign but somehow in-between the familiar and the foreign.   Prior to this body of work, we were involved in a series of covert, public performance pieces. Our point of departure for each of these works was a desire to create an experience which felt both “real” and “scripted”. In these interventions, actors executed a commonplace segment of dialogue and/or movement; while the script was appropriate to the scene at hand, various forms of repetition within and of the script would slowly suggest that what appeared to be ordinary behavior was in fact scripted. Although in each of these performances what was at stake was the anxiety of the boundary between the real and the scripted, each work took on a unique inflection, a particular movement along this boundary. For example, in Performance 4: The Line, two actors playing a romantic couple engaged in the same 41-line quarrel 41 times. Each time the couple had the argument, however, one line would be different: line 1 of dialogue 1 would be an alternate line, as would line 2 of dialogue 2, and so on. These alternate lines, never spoken as a complete dialogue but nonetheless embedded in the many “actual” dialogues, form a potentially new dialogue in which the power dynamic between the man and the woman is the reverse of that in the original dialogue. These works are emblematic of our effort to make evident what we might call the anxiety of certain boundaries or in-between spaces, so as to allow the emergence of a dormant possibility.