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'Shock Site' by Spencer Longo at King’s Leap, New York

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King’s Leap is pleased to present Shock Site, an exhibition of new work by Spencer Longo. The drawing, sculpture, and collage assembled here address screen-mediated violence, virality, and the physical conditions of viewing. The title of the show refers both to the webpages that infamously host gore, coprophilia, and pornographic novelties, and an attempt to locate the experience of viewing distressing material somewhere between the screen and the regulatory systems of the human body.

From within a collage on aluminum panels, two boys stare out from the mirrored packaging of a budget consumer television. They are the Dnipropetrovsk Maniacs, two Ukranians convicted of carrying out a vicious and random 21-victim killing spree in 2007. The pair’s trial garnered extra media attention due to the prosecution's claim that they made videos of these acts to sell to a wealthy foreign website operator that had supposedly ordered forty snuff films. One of these videos eventually did make it to the web, making the rounds on LiveLeak, torrents, and snuff/gore web backchannels. Alongside this image, concept art for battle-royale video game characters, fantasy illustrations, the packaging of ready-to-maim fireworks, and the poster for the Shia LeBeouf-led tale of murder-next-door Disturbia adorn the surface of the TV box in a dense collage towards a pop-imaginary of witnessed-violence. Here Longo has assembled a delicate calculus where mediated-cruelty and bodily extremism stand in for extremism at large.

The show’s eponymous sculpture, Shock Site (Haptic Ass Rig), combines the literal seat where one might sit at their computer and encounter online snuff with guts and lengths of intestinal tract rendered with a high degree of anatomical precision, using practical special effects techniques and materials sourced from Hollywood prop-supply stores. Taken together, two sites emerge for the impression and resonance of gory viscera: both the screen and the flows of images sloshing within it, as well as the entrails and vital organs of the human body that become surfaces for a physical empathetic response from the viewer.

After all, guts, like screens, come replete with their own cultures: bacteria and sensory equipment that regulate physical and emotional responses to a variety of stimuli. This thread is taken up in a pair of drawings, dendritic, pro-complexity forms that reference the structure of neurons and nerves, the material components that process and transmit our frame for reality. These tuberous, rhizomatic paths of inquiry create a dense unified field where disparate forces, like biological hazards and rapidly-growing living systems, can be at once at odds, yet intertwined.

25.10.19 — 24.11.19

King’s Leap

'ABSINTHE', Group Show Curated by PLAGUE at Smena, Kazan

'Pupila' by Elizabeth Burmann Littin at Two seven two gallery, Toronto

'Auxiliary Lights' by Kai Philip Trausenegger at Bildraum 07, Vienna

'Inferno' by Matthew Tully Dugan at Lomex, New York

'Зamok', Off-Site Group Project at dentistry Dr. Blumkin, Moscow

'Dog, No Leash', Group Show at Spazio Orr, Brescia

'Syllables in Heart' by Thomas Bremerstent at Salgshallen, Oslo

'Out-of-place artifact', Off-Site Project by Artem Briukhov in Birsk Fortress, Bi

'Gardening' by Daniel Drabek at Toni Areal, Zurich

'HALF TRUTHS', Group Show at Hackney Road, E2 8ET, London

'Unknown Unknowns' by Christian Roncea at West End, The Hague

'Thinking About Things That Are Thinking' by Nicolás Lamas at Meessen De Clercq,

‘Funny / Sad’, Group Show by Ian Bruner, Don Elektro & Halo, curated by Rhizome P

'Don’t Die', Group Show at No Gallery, New York

'Almost Begin' by Bronson Smillie at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver

'I'll Carry Your Heart's Gray Wing with a Trembling Hand to My Old Age', Group Sh

'hapy like a fly' by Clément Courgeon at Colette Mariana, Barcelona

'Fear of the Dark' by Jack Evans at Soup, London

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