It’s not actually yours, and you’re not actually you.

As soon as it is known, it is unknown, a porous membrane that is mistaken for a solid barrier. 

Do as much as you want with language to contain and control it, but it won’t change the fact that I am a body and I have needs. So are you, and so do you. 

We believe it when it tells us what it is, not because it’s a matter of right or wrong or true or false, but because it knows itself best and who are we to tell it otherwise. 

I like “middle” because it is the medium between thing and thing (and thing and thing and thing), the place of exchange, the environment. I mean the middle ground between body and failure, a middle ground, a compromise?  “Bodies” does not have to call to mind the exclusively human, it evokes something more wide or teeming.  

this has to happen as fast as possible because waiting introduces time for questioning.

Our daily duties like toothbrushing will include sex with an animal, one that we desperately want to keep in the world, and we’ll dimly guess beyond a veneer of habit that only this service keeps us human.  But it’s all part of the morning ritual.

What’s this middle ground, where we touch and are touched, where the gaze falls and despite itself is of supreme importance, like everything is part of an Enya song.

Do you know that your skin is full of holes?

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Actual Size Los Angeles is pleased to present Middle Ground, an exhibition of images and imaginings by Anna Ialeggio and Michael Thurin that offer maps towards corporeal possibilities. The works displayed render boundaries while making tangible the porous nature of flesh. The provisional gestures presented are attempts to approach myths of the somatic and embody an expanded space of what it means to have and be had by a body. 

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Anna Ialeggio lives and works in Los Angeles, and drives to Irvine.  Her approach to art is pretty much LARPing: picking at the permeable membranes of daily life and looking for helpful wild new mythologies of conduct on a slippery slope. This work exists somewhere between journalism and myth, immersion and self-awareness, capital and autonomy, intactness and evolution.  The biodiversity of ecosystems and ideas, filtered through a collective response and fast/cheap/at-hand materials, is an echoing constant.  Anna has worked with the Mars Desert Research Station, Human Resources LA, Wave Farm, Kunstradio, The Hammer Museum, Art Farm, Van AbbeMuseum, Mass MOCA, The Los Angeles Natural History Museum, Philadelphia Mural Arts, KCHUNG Radio, The Miss Rockaway Armada, and the Philadelphia Arts Alliance.   She is a 2019 MFA candidate at the University of California, Irvine.

 

Michael Thurin is a Southern California-based interdisciplinary artist. Through still and moving imagery, text, and live performance, Thurin's work speculates upon the specificities of bodies and their physical, material, and affective capacities. Central to their process is a commitment to body-based, non-dualistic knowledge. They believe in the radical possibilities of doing by being by feeling by unknowing by being by not doing. Engaging critically and imaginatively in discourses and praxes within critical trans politics, queer theory, disability studies, and radical pedagogy, Thurin’s work seeks to create a nonlinear timespace for the liberation of all bodies. They are an MFA in Art candidate at the University of California, Irvine.