Parafictions

[NB: Due to extreme weather conditions, this event, originally scheduled for February 10, has been rescheduled of February 17.]


EFA Project Space
323 W 39 Street, 2nd Floor
New York, New York

Wednesday, February 17 | 6:30 - 8 pm
Performance-Presentations
Parafacts and Parafictions: Helguera, Blachly & Shaw

'Parafacts and Parafictions: Helguera, and Blachly & Shaw' is an evening of performance-presentations organized in conjunction with the exhibition Companion, curated by REV- and currently on view at EFA Project Space. Pablo Helguera and Jimbo Blachly & Lytle Shaw will enact live components to their projects included in Companion, followed by a Q & A session moderated by Marisa Jahn, artist and exhibition curator.

"Art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty offers a definition of the term 'parafiction', a term used to describe an emergent genre of artwork that plays in the overlap between fact and fiction: "Like a paramedic as opposed to a medical doctor, a parafiction is related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as established in literature and drama. It remains a bit outside. It does not perform its procedures in the hygienic clinics of literature, but has one foot in the field of the real." If a 'parafiction' operates in that space between fictional and real, alongside this term we might position a second: a 'parafact'-an artwork that more stringently draws from the real-but a 'real' whose narrative is so curious, exquisite, or implausible so as to call into question its own veracity. Pablo Helguera, and Jimbo Blachly & Lytle Shaw's performance-presentations engage both of these tacts. In so doing, the artists raise questions about the function of truth and fiction-its bearing on knowledge, ethics, or aesthetic transformation.

The Temporary Museum of Vaseline in Perth Amboy is the latest iteration of J. Blachly and Lytle Shaw's ongoing research into the cast of characters known as the 'Chadwick family.' While following up leads about missing Chadwick family relics in the New Jersey city, the duo instead stumbled upon the possibility of naturally occurring Vaseline springs in the region.

Pablo Helguera's 'What in the World' replicates a popular television show from the 1950's in which artifacts were presented to a team of archaeologists, artists, and aficionados to decipher. Adapting the show's theatrical conventions for a You Tube generation, Helguera departs from the objects to focus on the eccentric museum staff, positioning the institution itself as the subject of the ethnographic inquiry."

[Text an graphic from EFA press mailing.]