Unstable boundaries permeate every dimension of

Gabriel Sierra’s exhibition for Kadist Art Foundation.

Through a series of surgical cuts, folds, and sutures in

the walls that divide and abut the exhibition space, the

artist has transected four rooms with a long, telescopic

sightline, conjoining Kadist, both visually and spatially,

with its next-door neighbor, the office of THE THING

Quarterly. Not content simply to puncture the surface

of each wall, Sierra has fashioned the apertures into

window frames that double as a shelf, or an open cabinet.

The view through the narrow, eye-level window carved

into Kadist’s Reading Room reveals a receding set of

nested rectangular structures and frames a tableau

mounted on the east wall of the property.

Those who wish to examine that distant tableau

or the intervening chambers more closely will have

had to return to the sidewalk before re-entering the

exhibition, as there is no corridor connecting all four

rooms. This kinesthetic imposition on the spectator

opens the external border of the exhibition space,

releasing it onto the streets of San Francisco’s Mission

District. Such a deliberate violation of the integrity

of the exhibition space refuses any easy distinction

between inside and outside. The authorial limit of

Sierra’s signature likewise comes into question, as what

becomes visible at the far end of the artist’s intervention

falls under the jurisdiction of THE THING editors John

Herschend and Will Rogan rather than Sierra himself.

(THE THING Quarterly is a periodical in the form of

an object.) This equivocation at the level of the artist’s

identity is compounded if the axis of Sierra’s windows

is understood as an unconscious projection of his own

artistic trajectory: the past five years have seen him

complicate an object-based production of the sort

championed by THE THING in favor of a set of practices

concerned primarily to effect ephemeral manipulations

of interior spaces.

The uncertainties provoked by this subtle but

unsettling tectonic intervention are multiplied further

by an edition of free, blue-and-white prints that Sierra

has produced to accompany the exhibition. Four

geometric drawings, arrayed along a diagonal that

ascends from left to right, show a progression from

(something that could be said to resemble) a four-

paned window to (something that could be said to

resemble) a pair of eyes. In between are two hybrid

forms: one resembling a pair of eyeglasses and the

other lying somewhere between spectacles and a

window frame. At first glance, this might appear to be

a basic blueprint of the perspectival convention that

guided the artist’s design of the exhibition space, since

it draws an explicit relationship between stereoscopic

vision and depth perception. But the middle terms of

Sierra’s progression resist such strictly literal lines

of interpretation: as prosthetic extensions of human

vision, the two pairs of spectacles stand as a reminder

that the aesthetic contemplation of a visual scene is

fundamentally a bodily faculty – and indeed, one that

is increasingly susceptible to enfeeblement. Sierra’s

poster thus puts the optometric dimensions of his

exhibition into a reciprocal relationship with its spatial

dimensions. If our perception of space is a function of

binocular vision, so, too, is the acuity of our vision a

function of the spaces we inhabit.

Gathered together under the title ( ), 2012,

Sierra’s exhibition forms a system that orchestrates the

dehiscence of a whole series of borders and distinctions,

from the architectural boundary between Kadist

and THE THING to the categorical division between

interior and exterior, from the limits of human vision

to the orbital limit of the artwork itself. In this regard,

Sierra’s project for Kadist forms a complex and nuanced

addition to his recent inquiries into the topologies of

built space and their corporeal and cognitive mediation.

With previous projects like the series Structures

for transition, 2008-2011, Untitled (Marginalia), 2011,

and Untitled (Intermission), 2012, Sierra transformed

the doorways, floor molding, and walls of his exhibition

spaces through procedures that bear a strong family

resemblance to the windows that currently adorn

Kadist. But more illuminating than the technical

alignment of ( ), with Sierra’s earlier works is

his habit of appending parenthetical titles to works he

nevertheless simultaneously declares as being untitled.

His regular deployment of this resource suggests that the

parenthesis performs a crucial conceptual function in

these pieces. According to the artist, it serves to “open

up the reading of the work, its meaning.” Such usage is

of course consistent with the conventional function of

using curved brackets to mark a rhetorical figure that

grammarians call an appositive; that is, a phrase that

modifies the preceding noun by supplementing it with

additional information. Appositives afford English

nouns a flexibility akin to that enjoyed by Sierra’s first

language, Spanish, by extending the range of positions

from which nouns can effectively be modified. As

markers of an appositive’s reach, curved brackets trace

the outer limit of a noun’s sphere of influence. And since

the modifications entailed by parenthetical appositives

are never more (nor less) than disposable additions

to the sense of a noun, they flicker on and off like a

pulsating star. By incorporating such parenthetical

appositives into the titles of his projects, Sierra sets in

motion a restless textual movement: each title becomes

its own celestial system, a dynamic field of untitled dark

matter and parenthetical pulsars, held together by their

competing gravitational pulls. How, then, to interpret

the chasm yawning between the two curved brackets

that the artist has affixed as the title of this project (or,

for that matter, his uncharacteristic abstention from

positing the vacuum of titlelessness in lieu of a title)?

Purified of any alphabetic content, it becomes

impossible to determine definitively whether the

brackets of ( ) function as punctuation marks

or as a pictogram. We are free, then, to read ( )

as a hieroglyphic rendering of the windows Sierra has

opened in the walls of Kadist, softening their right

angles to give them a load bearing capacity, like the ribs

of a tunnel. Or, with an eye to the spectacles on Sierra’s

schematic poster, we might prefer to regard ( )

as a human cornea, elongated and myopic from too

much time spent indoors. A more exorbitant reading of

( ) begins to emerge, however, when we recall

that Erasmus of Rotterdam coined the term lunulae

to refer to curved brackets, acknowledging their close

resemblance to a waning and waxing crescent moon—

or, we might add, to the phases of a solar eclipse,

like the one that happened just after the opening of

Sierra’s exhibition. Although the artist insists that the

coincidence was entirely accidental, it is hard to resist

the force of attraction that would unite these two events

in a single system.

For a few minutes on the evening of May 20,

terrestrial observers in the western United States could

watch as the moon’s orbit brought it directly in line with

the sun. In San Francisco, a few hundred miles south

of the eclipse’s path of annularity, shadows briefly

came alive, dappling the earth with tiny crescents.

Unintentionally or otherwise, then, the title, ( ),

suggests a tantalizing pictographic rendering of

this optical phenomenon, which pulls this strange

coincidence ineluctably into the logic of Gabriel Sierra’s

exhibition. Even considered strictly as a punctuation

mark, the title ( ) designates the very kind of

appositive relationship that unites his (blue)print to

his architectural intervention, and reveals that Sierra’s

procedure has ultimately been to translate the rhetorical

structure of the appositive into space and time. ( )

is a complex, dynamic weave of relative distances: the

distance between a pair of eyes; the distance between

that pair of eyes and the objects on display in THE

THING; the distance between an inside and an outside;

the distance that accrues between the exhibition space

at Kadist and the multiple copies of Sierra’s print as

they disseminate across the globe to Sierra’s home

in Bogotá, to Kadist’s cousins in Paris, and beyond;

the distance between one curved bracket and the

other. But the porous borders of the exhibition cause

these distances to multiply, starting with the distance

between the artist’s subjectivity and the subjectivities of

those who experience his exhibition, and ending (only

provisionally, of course) with the distances between

Earth, Moon, and Sun and beyond, between our solar

system, the Pleiades, and the center of the galaxy. What

( ) names, finally, inescapably, is an eclipse:

the visual manifestation of a momentary alignment,

attached parenthetically to a brief but perceptible

anomaly in the curvature of space-time.

Christopher Michael Fraga

Produced by Joseph del PescoPhotography by Jeff WarrinText by Christopher Michael FragaEdited by Laura Richard

This publication marks the 2012 residency and public exhibition of ( ) by Gabriel Sierra. The artwork was commissioned and produced by Kadist and installed by Peter Belkin under the direction of Sierra. Thanks to Lauren Hartman, Helen Lanier, Joe Melamed, and Charlene Tan.

Kadist Art Foundation 3295 20th StreetSan Francisco, CA 94110 USA + 1 (415) 738-8668 www.kadist.org

Each year Kadist Art Foundation hosts artists, curators and art magazines in San Francisco. While traditional residency programs are organized in the style of a retreat, removing the artist from the fray of urban life, the Kadist residency places artists squarely within the heart and history of San Francisco.

Kadist participates in the development of society through contemporary art, collecting and producing the work of artists and conducting various programs to promote their role as cultural agents. Kadist’s collections include works that reflects the global scope of contemporary art, and its programs develop an active exchange between Kadist’s local contexts (Paris, San Francisco) and artists, curators, academics and art publishers worldwide.