A Salad In The Living Room
10.05 – 11.23.2024
An exhibition by Lydia Rosenberg and Rebecca Steele \\ presented by Anytime Dept. at Clay St. Press, 1312 Clay St. Cincinnati, OH 45202 \\ Gallery hours: Saturdays 11 am - 4 pm \\ Reception Saturday, 10.05.2024, 6-8 pm
A Salad in the Living Room is the setting of a narrative exchange between two characters engaged in a carefully coded plot to smuggle a series of secret texts from one secure location to another. S1 and S2 are preparing a salad and handling the coordination of the lawn care. The salad is complicated by various suppliers and the lawn is in need of a new kind of sod that the smugglers are discussing. The dialogue is a coded discussion of this clandestine network of tasks.
Video, photographic document and object present a carefully constructed scene; elements of a salad in various states of form and references to lawns and landscaping, tent-like structures and improvisational interventions comprise the exhibition. Artistic collaborators Rebecca Steele and Lydia Rosenberg (of Cincinnati's former artist-run gallery Anytime Dept.) lay out a matrix of absurdist gestures that imply a strict and hidden-in-plain-sight scheme to securely transport an important series of texts without detection.
The exhibition is part evidence and part stage allowing a space in which words, objects and image (moving and still) form a world built up of cyphers.
The opening reception will feature a live salad making event with a pamphlet of artistic references.
