Two works by Shirley Tse, originally exhibited indoors, are remixed under the spell of wild elements in The Magic Hour’s current iteration time going backward and forward.

Founded in 2018 in Twentynine Palms, California by Alice Wang and Ben Tong, The Magic Hour has hosted six prior iterations (or experimental installations), each for ten weeks and anchored by a set of reconfigurable steel bars (co-produced by Dyson & Womack). Through their sojourn in this seemingly borderless desert tract named after a sliver of time, Tse’s Decommissioned Inter-Mission (2022) and Instant Archeology (2006) conjure space-time wormholes that decontextualize and recontextualize the pieces’ projections of our pasts-to-be.

Decommissioned Inter-Mission is the remaining skeleton of Tse’s installation Inter-Mission (2004), stripped of its panel walls and six interior sculptures. Inter-Mission references voting booths, art fair booths and bathroom stalls—intersections of private or privatized “missions” in public arenas—and was first installed in the back room—not quite private, not quite public—of an NYC gallery. While the sculptures critique the commodification of art, they ironically became “hostages” of the now notorious (but then progressive) Artist Pension Trust.

Ballasted by The Magic Hour’s steel bars against the wind in an assertion of survival outside the art game, the imperfectly rigid polyethylene grid—all that Tse has retained of the piece—invokes and critiques Mondrian’s Neoplasticism (and its dream of utopian order through abstract geometry), while also suggesting film set scrim jims and oversized iPhones. These montaged allusions—each slotting separable or elemental bodies between or within frames—reveal our cognate attempts to construct and participate “successfully” in worlds as individuals, clarifying through restatement ways of pursuing and proving our personhood that we have come to accept (for better and worse) as familiar or real.

Shirley Tse, Instant Archeology, 2006. Image courtesy of The Magic Hour.

Instant Archeology, through its probable improbability, also rearticulates the unsettlingly familiar. A plastic “ice core” ostensibly unearthed in the desert, it fails and succeeds as a 2006 archeological time capsule as exact copies of the unchanged relic could be made today. Entrenched within sight of a water tank’s directive, “Be Water Aware,” it underscores scarcity through its abiding superfluousness. With time so salient at The Magic Hour, Tse’s pieces remind us that our futures and pasts are ever-present.

 

The Magic Hour
67975 Presswood Rd
Twentynine Palms, CA 92277 (contact The Magic Hour for exact location)
On view through October 15, 2022