DUPLEX is proud to present Study 4: Collateral, a solo exhibition of Sophia Giovannitti’s work. Collateral will open off-site on September 24 at P.P.O.W. in Tribeca, where a new performance and film from Giovannitii will be on view. The exhibition at Duplex will open the following day—Sunday, September 25—in Chinatown, where artworks and ephemera related to Giovannitti’s performance and conceptual work will be on view through October 16th, 2022.

Continuing her ongoing series of conceptual studies—wherein the process of value production by the artist and its attendant negotiations is itself the work—Sophia Giovannitti will mount her second solo show at Duplex, Study 4: Collateral. In her first show largely composed of wall work and objects, Giovannitti moves focus away from an erotic and opaque delineation of space, and toward clean and transparent transaction, locating into a traditional register her attempted excavation and transgression of the prescribed relationship between artist and: collector, dealer, gallerist, voyeur, viewer. To her mind, all collectible work functions as a form of collateral to the collector: a stand-in for what one earnestly hopes to collect on in the end, whether sex, social access, cultural capital, or increased profit.

With Collateral, Giovannitti plays with the limits and possibilities of retaining information while exposing oneself: hiding in plain sight, as it were. Composed of both ambiguous and explicit records of past performance and transaction—some public and some private—she seeks to make legible and collectible the very contours of negotiation as art form, while still attempting to retain control, however futilely, of the dissemination of her past, present, and future actions as artist. Alongside copies of Contract, photographic records of performance, a brutalized and disembodied bed-frame, and a poetic-surveillance film, Debt recordings will sit for sale: audio recordings of unfinished business between artist and gallerist, artist and photographer, artist and curator— functioning as veiled exposure of the work behind the work, in all its grotesque and mundane glory. Purchase of such recordings, each editioned, requires first the signing of an NDA, written and specified by the artist. Through curated and transmuted impressions of past performance, alongside failed gestures toward limiting the dissemination of information and narrative—neutered by the artist’s own disbelief in legal recourse—she seeks explicit conflict between the dead and alive elements of her work. So long as she owns it, she can kill it, and so long as she doesn’t, she can’t.

As Giovannitti’s work conceptually engages and amplifies the material tensions and stratifications inherent to art world value production and extraction, Collateral, too, embraces this geographically, utilizing a dual-site, dual-neighborhood form. Collateral will open off-site on September 24 at P.P.O.W. Giovannitti will execute a six-hour performance—A Machine— in Cortlandt Alley with her boyfriend and a welder, as her newest short film, A Monopoly on Violence, plays in the viewing room inside. Both A Machine and A Monopoly on Violence explore: gender, erotics, ownership, violence, derivative art, marketplace, outlaws, surveillance, love.

A Machine draws oblique inspiration from Robert Morris’s 1964 piece Site, first performed alongside Carolee Schneemann at Surplus Dance Theater. Site itself reimagined Olympia—Édouard Manet’s famed 1863 painting of a nude prostitute gazing directly at the viewer—as a live performance, in which Morris constructed and deconstructed a wooden box around Schneemann, who reclined nude in Olympia’s pose and choker, the signifier of her labor status. Of Site, Schneemann wrote, “[M]y own kinetic theater was obscured by the appreciation of and excitement around [Morris’s] work. I have said that being in Site both historicized and immobilized me,” but that also, “There has been too much retroactive criticism of Site as lacking in feminist principles.” Morris reflected of the piece’s origins and execution, “I suggested that each of us should have a turn making something in which the other performed . . . What I came up with was Site, a work in which Carolee did take off her clothes, got painted white, but did not move. She never made a work with a role for me as a performer. This may have been because she disapproved of my casting her as Manet’s Olympia in Site. Still, she did not refuse to perform in the work.” A Machine simultaneously subverts and reifies Site’s relationship to gender and the muse. Through objectification, object production, and explicit heterosexuality, Giovannitti reimagines the gendered lineage of the work, foregrounding and troubling the relationship of gender to labor, authorship, recognition, and legibility; the ethics of immortalizing a person as a muse; what it means to “do nothing.”

Through performance and film, Giovannitti works toward the deconstruction of both misogynist, and historically feminist, gendered expectations of women artists, which each in their own way narrow the capacity for an autonomy of meaning.

Study 4: Collateral will be up at Duplex from September 25th through October 16th. The gallery will be open Friday, Saturday and Sunday 1 - 6pm.

Full press release here.

BIO

Sophia Giovannitti is a conceptual artist based in New York. She studies the commodification of the parts of ourselves we hold dear, positing, from a materialist perspective, that there is no way out but through. Through her ongoing series of performance-based studies, beginning with Untitled (Incall), executed at Recess from May–June 2021, and continuing with Incall: Study 2; Contract, a solo show at Duplex from March–April 2022, she seeks to trouble and re-choreograph the opaque systems of eroticized exchange facilitating value extraction from artists by those in positions of material and cultural power. Her first film, In Heaven: An Alternate Reality Game, premiered at the Athens Biennale in September 2021; her second, Dirty Calculations, premiered at Cryptographic Art in December 2021. Her first book, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex, is forthcoming from Verso in 2023. Her work exists in the through-space of sale, scam, and reflection, allowing new forms of value production to occur.

ABOUT P.P.O.W.

P.P.O.W. was founded by Wendy Olsoff and Penny Pilkington in the first wave of the East Village art galleries in New York City in 1983. In 1988 the gallery moved to Soho, in 2002 moved to Chelsea, and opened in Tribeca in 2021. Since its inception, the gallery has remained true to its early vision, showing contemporary work in all media. There is a commitment to the work of pioneering artists and the next generation of artists who create work exploring issues of gender, sexuality, race and social inequality.