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• 1 2016-02-26T21:28:47-08:00 We have displaced them because we have replaced them. (Objects Lie on a Table, 109) 11 plain 2016-03-22T17:27:44-07:00 In rehearsing this play, artworks thus reveal a funny thing about an exhibition’s gestalt: a theme is no longer in the foreground, supported by a set of chosen works that illustrate it. Here, artworks frame the exhibition and performatively interpret the play, enacting the play’s operative principles within a different discursive framework—the ultimate stage set for Stein’s play, modelled as it was on conventions in the visual arts.
  Themes or concepts in the exhibition are of the exhibition and do not follow prescriptives (like parts of speech freed of predication). Meaning is created (and undone) by changing the arrangement of the exhibition or through experiments the artists make with processes that lend themselves to unsettling conventional modes of intelligibility. Liddington’s still lives point to innovations in the genre that rival Stein’s own radical approach to compositional arrangement, similarly proposing ways to (cheekily) “represent” a still life through performative techniques, such as through collaboration (The fruit of our joint labour …, 2015), or by applying two-dimensional compositional approaches (drawing) to three-dimensional arrangements (Two Views of Bananas ..., 2015). Frames perform in this rehearsal, too. As in Stein’s play, they hover somewhere in between foreground and background.
  
  DeFreitas’ untitled (these textile works) No. 10 & No. 29, 2015 frame and are framed by the wallpaper on which they are hung.
  
  The exhibition design likewise plays with ways that meaning can be re-framed, both conceptually and spatially. Liddington's Weighted Dancers Under a Spotlight..., 2016, is presented in the gallery’s storage space.
  
  But now this space is no longer a “behind the scenes,” or a “backstage.” What is it doing here? Weighted dancers under spotlight… dries over time and the form compresses and shrinks as it settles into itself—that’s what it is doing here—a process that is, in fact, hardly detectable in one visit to the space, no matter how well it is explicated by its “frame.” Just as frames can point to other things not going on in the “picture,” the works in this show perform, but not always for us.
  
  ​GO BACK TO it is by no means strange to arrange