Mike Calway-Fagen: Tool Use for Passion Project
March 8, 2024 - May 12, 2024
Opening Reception Friday, March 8, 5-8pm
CO-OPt Research + Projects presents works by Indianapolis-based artist, writer, and curator Mike Calway-Fagen, with a reception on Friday, March 8, 2024: Tool Use for Passion Project.
"Passion Projects" are less serious, diminished in the eyes of the professional class by their lack of capital production and contribution to the GDP. Passion is sensual, even animalistic, not of the mind but of the body. Historically it, and words like it, were, and still are, used to identify less human, savage, or animalistic attributes, those that could be assigned to whatever race, class, sexual preference the hegemony needed to devalue to maintain their perceived supremacy/primacy.
“Tool Use” is a phrase that has been used to distinguish more capable non-human animals from those less capable. More recently, this understanding has expanded and more behaviors are considered to be tool utilization. In turn, more creatures have been elevated to an evolutionary plane more near to humans. But many non-human animals’ capabilities are far more sophisticated than those of humans. For instance, the memory of crows, the communication capabilities of whales, the sentient limbs of the octopus, or the vast multi-tasking capacity of pigeons.
But what constitutes a tool?
What about language? It’s a tool but also more. Words are magic instruments for bringing the world under human capture. A thought can’t be thought in the absence of language. Try it.
What’s more, every word you can pair with a signifier is only able to be paired based on all the other words you know. A juice box is so because you understand “juice” and “box.” “Box” is known due to your understanding of “rectangle,” which you know because it’s neither a square or a circle and so on and so forth. All words are laced up with all other words.
And where does the tool end and the user begin? If the world is an endless network of causal systems then are tools and users reciprocal and continuous?
Wouldn’t that make everything a tool, used by everything else, and driven by a human animal and non-human animal passion?
That is the project.
Black bean, black bird, black heart, the black crows, black metal
About the artist:
Mike Calway-Fagen is an artist, writer, and curator based in Indianapolis, IN. He received an MFA from the University of California, San Diego and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recently Calway-Fagen held solo exhibitions at ArtSpace in Raleigh, NC, the University of Arkansas, the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, and the Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN. Recent group exhibitions include those at LABspace in Hillsdale, NY, HORSE AND PONY in Berlin, MASS Gallery in Austin, TX, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Calway-Fagen has attended residencies at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and Sculpture Space in Utica, NY, among others. Calway-Fagen has lectured at Yale University, the Universities of California, Tennessee, Oregon, Cincinnati, Alabama, Georgia, Nevada, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and others. During the pandemic, Mike developed a number of essays including "Tmesis Pieces Memesis, Could you repeat sis?" on the work of Peter Hoffecker-Mejia for a catalogue published in conjunction with the artist’s solo museum exhibition. Mike has been a full-time curator since 2017.
mikecalway-fagen.com
