All The World Began With A Yes

The Lodge LA

1024 N Western Ave.

Los Angeles, CA 90029

 

"All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.  But before prehistory there was the prehistory of the prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don't know why, but I do know that the universe never began." - Clarice Lispector, "Hour of the Star”

Leonora Carrington Ray Johnson Alex Israel Wayne Koestenbaum Anna Ostoya Charles Long Pacifico Silano Nicolas Guagnini Scarlett Rouge Cole Lu Katie Hector Daniel Nielsen Luke O’Halloran Athena Lemanska Amir Guberstein Jordí Alos Ivan Rios-Fetchko

The works included in this exhibition demonstrate a yearning for the "yes." As Clarice Lispector wrote in her final work, a yes represents a beginning of the world, or alternatively, a yes within the never — the mystical space of a world without beginning or end. In our society, yes is an affirmative answer. Yes binds us to the social contract of consent in complicity with authority and order. Underlying this binding web we collectively embody and individually navigate is a more primal yes: an explosion of life within the vastness of the universe; the potency of a sexual encounter with a stranger; the spells, fantasies, and deities made animate through our imaginations. The yes contains the creative and destructive forces that promote fusion, alchemy and revolution. The angelic, the spectral, and the alien are found together in a chorus chanting "yes."

We will never know why our world is as it is, whether it started or always was. The tragic flaw of being human, in the Oedipal quest for unrequited answers to the riddles, yields unceasing fascination and torment. But with the yes, we create, as Proust suggests, the beginning of the world, not at the beginning of time but every day anew. The yes becomes our secret conduit, heralding transcendence, magic and the spectacle. This exhibition reminds us of the power, the seduction, and the ancient desire within the yes — the clarion call that is not lost within the ether of the infinite. -

- Josh Lockman