October 18 - November 17, 2024
From the Car Wash:
“The Car Wash is pleased to present RINSE, an exhibition of new video work by the London-based artist Mimi Bowman and curated by Max Tolleson. Set to Other Joe’s “I Run This City” and drawing upon a wide range of source material that spans media archives and VHS to social media and digital video from across the internet, Bowman’s RINSE atomizes found footage into a field of forces, affects, intensities and vibrations that characterize the chaotic undercurrent of life’s most defining qualities. RINSE is the third exhibition in a series that includes Bowman’s RUNT (2024) and RIFF (2024) and is on view Saturdays and Sundays from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. and by appointment from October 18—November 17 at 900 Richmond Avenue, Houston, Texas, 77006, with a public reception on October 18 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
For Bowman, each of her videos is an attempt at recreating the sensation of what she calls a “download,” or daylight hallucination, in which a flood of images appears to her in rapid-fire succession, distilled into textures, shapes and rhythms. Bowman, who is pursuing a master’s degree in archeology, has described her practice of outmaneuvering the circumscribed feeds of social media algorithms as akin to “breaking a horse,” and the resultant video she salvages glimmers like an excavated fragment from a digital dirt bed. Alongside found footage, the first and last segment of each video is typically created by Bowman. Music becomes a binding agent as a single soundtrack washes over each video’s disparate components like a unifying ocean of resonant affect.
In Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, Elizabeth Grosz writes that, “In the beginning is chaos, the whirling, unpredictable movement of forces, vibratory oscillations that constitute the universe.” In Bowman’s work, perennial subjects such as humans, other animals, and the behavioral patterns and gestures they make are transformed into networks, fields, and territories of chaotic intensity, forming what Édouard Glissant might call a poetics of relation between species, cultures, mythologies and geographies. With flickering speed, Bowman depicts living beings in emergent states of becoming more than or less than or simply other than what they were, as they are propelled interminably forward by a condition of vibratory difference.
Mimi Bowman (b. 1989, Austin, Texas) lives in London. Bowman holds a B.A. in archeology and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in archeology at University College London with the hope of working in karez rehabilitation in northern Iraq. In September 2023 she curated Oshay Green and Isabel Legate’s dual exhibition Holometabolism at Martha’s Contemporary. In 2023 her collaborative video work with Jonny Negron was included in Electricity • Shadow at Château Shatto. Many of her videos can be viewed at her Instagram account @dallemimi.”
Reception: October 18, 2024 | 6–9 pm
900 Richmond Avenue
Houston, 77006 Texas
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