Over the past month, Locust Projects has hosted a series of engaging Roundtables talks at their space in the Design District. An ongoing program with topics proposed and moderated by local artists, one special edition looked at site-specificity and context in Jacqueline Falcone: The Wrong Place.
Inspired by Miwon Kwon’s essay of the same name, the term “site-specific” is most often used in relation to sculpture, installation and performance, with a unique capacity to deal with matters of gender, race, ecology and human rights—its manifestation determined by the project’s physical space. For Falcone, issues of spatial politics and domesticity are explored within the genre: in what she has named the Jacqueline Falcone Bed & Breakfast, the artist presents a literal bedroom as an alternative exhibition space.
Where Falcone’s Roundtables discussion at Locust Projects invited visitors to consider the presentation of art outside the traditional contexts of museums and galleries, this is both ironic and self-referential in that Kwon warns against an examination of site-specific work at an institution. Fearing that the change of place—a museum or gallery—emphasizes the artist’s aesthetic and subjective language, the narrative may become abstracted when spoken outside of the original site it was intended for. Questions like these are all up for conversation with Falcone.
The finale of the Roundtables series features Adler Guerrier. Based on a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, his talk is slated for Tuesday, September 8 from 7 to 8:30 p.m.
