Michel Obultra Launch

Wednesday, December 19 6-8 pm

Join us on Wednesday December 19 from 6-8 pm for the launch of the first portfolio from Éditions Michel Obultra, an itinerant exhibition and publishing program. The portfolio includes a punched and printed text piece/musical score by Beate Engl, 7 color risograph by Rochelle Feinstein, archival pigment photograph by Maryam Jafri, and writing instruments by Khalil Rabah. Organized by Stephanie Weber. Produced in a signed and numbered edition of 100 and packaged in a custom silkscreened corrugated box.

Each work in Michel Obultra 1 represents a range of possible methods of multiple production. This plurality of mechanical means is echoed in the works’ internal multiplicity. Beate Engl’s ON AIR is a slogan as well as a musical score composed of two layers of paper; Rochelle Feinstein’s Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain captures the results of refraction and dispersion on white light. It at once depicts and suspends the elusive optical phenomenon its title hints at. Maryam Jafri’s Lineage, a photographic mise-en-abyme, draws on several splits within the artistic subject: presentation and representation, disclosure and concealment, individual authorship and inscription. Finally, Khalil Rabah’s Pencils from The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind locates a dialectic within a souvenir article: national identity and universal emancipation are the multiples here, divided by a non-existent museum whose specter haunts the writing instrument.