In his exceptionally fine book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, Bernard Suits loosely defines a game as the overcoming of unnecessary obstacles. For example, “golf” becomes a game only when, instead of simply hand-placing the golf-ball in the hole and getting on with business, we attempt to hit it there from hundreds of yards away using only specially designed little sticks. A totally unnecessary activity.

In her latest exhibition with Projective City, Jo Q. Nelson has created a course of ambiguous obstacles as potential sites of unnecessary achievement. Evoking simultaneously the playground as a space of imaginative recreation, the military training ground as a space of improvised field conditions, and the American tradition of spectacular entertainment through daredevil stunts, Nelson’s interactive “sculptures” also reference the sculptural installations of recent decades. Drawing on other venues in which spaces are transformed into sites of unnecessary play (skateboarding, parkour, playgrounds) as much as on her art historical education, her work (like all artwork) is presented both as an obstacle to be overcome (by being comprehended, fathomed, experienced) and as a space of play in which the rules and outcomes are not fixed and must be decided by each individual encounter.

Jo Q. Nelson lives and works in New York. Her work is a hybrid of built environments, fantasy proposals, and collaborative projects that look at social interactions in public spaces. Nelson received a MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College, and has created site-specific installations in galleries and public places, collaborating with various organizations including Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; Flux Factory, Long Island City, NY; Scaramouche Gallery, NYC; Spazi Docili, Florence, Italy; and Fjellerup i Bund & Grund, Fjellerup, Denmark.

-------

This is Mixed Greens’ sixteenth installment of Paris-Scope — a series of peculiar, collaborative exhibitions that give visitors to Mixed Greens a glimpse into French-based Projective City’s gallery space. The unique series provides a new possibility for the practice of exhibiting aesthetic experience, and allows artists unprecedented control over the gallery space. Through this alchemical experiment into the possibilities of “action at a distance,” the viewer is able to peer into (but obviously not enter) the space both thousands of miles away and inches from his or her nose — to mystically be both HERE and THERE simultaneously.

For more information, please visit joqnelson.com


Download Press Release