Contributing Artists

Rex Delafkaran

Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:

How do the objects we live with inform who we are, how we move? How do we undestand the objects around us through the languages of our identities? What does the gym promise us physcailly, emotionally, economically, and spiritually? How can we trouble the assurance of transformation stored in gym objects? We are exercsising our cultural identities just as much as our bodies. How deeply do rituals of sexuality, athleticism, and aspirational cultural consumerism run? Home Gym considers the discomfort, intimacy, and interplay between bodies and commodities, and how we bring them home.

The gym is a space in which dominant and sub-cultural practices play out covertly, overtly, awkwardly. I wonder what happens, then, when we physcailly live with the gym or its ideals.There is fear embedded in working out, fear of death, decay, failure; there is also a promise of infinite health, strength, survival at play. These fears and promises are practiced through form, repetition, and rehearsal. Is this emobodiment? What are we rehearsing for?