Sarah Conaway: The Fold

November 13 – December 19, 2010

ARTIST STATEMENT

Above the fold. Come into the fold. Know when to hold ‘em. Know when to fold ‘em. Doctrine of the two-fold truth as articulated by Siger of Brabant: principles which were in opposition to faith could not be disproved by reason and were, in fact, necessary truths. Revealed truth could not, therefore, be the province of reason, only of faith. All else, the science of the physical world, belonged to reason. Thou hast obeyed the Law. But mark well, when thou receivest good, so equally art bound to return good threefold. To embrace a "thing" or a "person" in its essence means to love it, to favor it. Thought in a more originary way, such favoring means to bestow essence as a gift. Such favoring is the proper essence of enabling, which not only can achieve this or that but also can let something essentially unfold in its provenance, that is, let it be. Folds are in a sense dual to unfolds, which take a starting value of some other type and apply a function recursively to decide how to construct a data structure, whereas a fold recursively breaks that structure down, replacing it with other functions and values. In keeping with Leibniz’s theory, that the whole universe is contained within each being, like the Baroque church, Deleuze argues that the process of folding constitutes the basic unit of existence. While there are elements of the fold already in Leibniz and the architecture and art of the period, as Deleuze points out, it gains a new consistency and significance when used as a creative term in this manner. Throughout "The Fold," Deleuze uses the concept of the fold to describe the nature of the human subject as the outside folded in: an immanently political, social, embedded subject. Giorgio Agamben finds that the origin of Western metaphysics lies in the conception that original experience be always already caught in a fold…that presence be always already caught in a signification. Hence, logos is the fold that gathers and divides all things in the putting together of presence.

Sarah Conaway received her MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2001. Her work has been featured in exhibitions in the US and abroad, including solo exhibitions at Bellwether Gallery, New York, and Julia Friedman Gallery, New York and Chicago, and group shows including Wall to Wall, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, Sarah Conaway/Graham Hudson, Gallery Diet Miami; Suitable Video: Works from the Suitable Exhibitions Archive, Western Exhibitions, Femmes, 64bis, Paris; Post Rose: Artists In and Out of Hazard Park, Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin; and I Am Eyebeam, Gallery 400, Chicago. Sarah Conaway lives and works in Los Angeles.