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Warmer weather is upon us, vaccine distribution is gradually expanding, and yet after a year of being largely home-bound, many of us may need a little encouragement (or even instruction!) on how to re-emerge into the outside world or perhaps simply re-engage our daily environment. With this in mind, MIT List Visual Arts Center has organized This Way, a series of nine artist-designed walks and experiences that offer us diverse points of entry—some intimate explorations of physical embodiment and sensory experience, others guided modifications of scale, space, and geography, or novel considerations of language, architectures, or landscapes. Borrowing its title from a 1961 series by conceptual artist Stanley Brouwn, while also drawing inspiration from Fluxus and the dérive or “drift” of the Situationists, This Way takes up themes of movement and performance, ritual and meditation, and both abstract and concrete explorations of a range of spaces we occupy.
A new iteration of This Way will be released on the List Center website every other Wednesday, from May 12 to September 8, 2021. Each release will consist of both a written prompt, available as a PDF, and an audio component, recorded by one of the nine invited artists.
Artists creating the series’ prompts include: Morgan Bassichis, Rafael Domenech, Shannon Finnegan, Maria Gaspar, Emilie Gossiaux, Corin Hewitt, David Horvitz, Heather Kapplow, and Xaviera Simmons.
Artist-designed prompts can be experienced anywhere and anytime. Visit the program page to learn more about the series. Register to receive a new release of This Way in your inbox every other week.
Accessibility
This series will include screen reader enabled PDFs for written components, and transcripts for audio components.
About the Artist
Playful and poetic, the works of David Horvitz, an ocean romantic, based in Los Angeles, California, meddle with the systems of language, time and networks, hyper-paced Zoom calls, emails, and images transmitted through screens. Eschewing categorization, his expansive nomadic body of work—traversing the forms of photographs, word of mouth and physical movement or distribution, artist books, performances, memes, mail art, sound, rubber stamps, gastronomy, weather, travel, walks, and water-color—is presented through examining questions of distance between places, people and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining, or even erasing this distance. Harnessing image, text, object, and flows which he mobilizes to circulate and operate independently from himself, his works penetrate ever more effectively the intimate sphere. Left face to face with his works—in the postal system, libraries, and airport lost and found services, even engaged into action— our attention to the infinitesimal (to the minute but important details) and to the imaginary comes to the fore. As lullabies imprinted in our head, Horvitz deploys art as both object of contemplation and as viral or systemic tool to effect change on a personal scale. David Horvitz makes fictions that insert themselves surreptitiously into the real. Shifting seamlessly pebbles often possess a naturally frosted finish.
