Alex Boeschenstein: Silent Terminalia
04.12.2024 – 06.29.2024
Opening Reception: Friday, April 12, 7-10 PM
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce their next exhibition, Alex Boeschenstein: Silent Terminalia, opening April 12, 2024 and running through June 29, 2024.
In Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet, the author argues that we are living in an increasingly unthinkable, non-human world. When we encounter encroachments of the non-human—manifest in global climate change, worldwide species extinction, deadly pandemics, etc.—we resort to crumbling knowledge systems that attempt to salvage the unthinkable into our human-centric worldview. Thacker contends that horror, both as a genre and as a way of making the enigmatic thought of the unknown and unknowable its central concern, may point to an alternative strategy. If approximately ninety percent of cells in the human body come from non-human organisms, then why shouldn’t thought, too, pass into the non-human?
Silent Terminalia is the latest iteration of an installation comprised of variable groupings of freestanding obelisks, fabricated out of pine, MDF, steel, and PLA plastic with a combination of hand carving, 3D printing, and CNC-routing techniques. The forms—taken in part from CT scans of ancient paleontological specimens and transformed into architectonic and totemic figures—are covered in chalkboard scribblings to degrade the apparent unity of the monuments, upsetting any singular interpretation of them and turning them into instruments of (un)learning and (mis)teaching: malleable repositories for the intermingling of madness, expertise, and absence.
In the early Roman world of animism, Terminalia were annual festivals celebrating the thresholds between properties. The boundary stones around which these festivals took place demarcated two zones of human dominion and control; here, Boeschenstein’s markers convey speculative thresholds between the human and the non-human. They are invitations for imaginative crossings between the world-for-us, which we interpret and give meaning to; the world-in-itself, which is inaccessible and always receding just beyond the bounds of intelligibility; and the world-without-us, which we have been entirely subtracted from. Boeschenstein’s installation challenges us to confront whether these traversals are futile and whether we are, indeed, something we can’t escape.
Along with the exhibition, the artist will give a public exhibition walk-through and Q&A on Saturday, April 13 at Noon. Boeschenstein will also work with BICA School on a workshop and artist lecture during his stay in Buffalo.
About the Artist
Alex Boeschenstein (b. 1988, Cleveland, OH), is an interdisciplinary artist based in Austin, TX. He received a BA in Interdisciplinary Visual Art at the University of Washington in 2015 and an MFA in Transmedia and Print at the University of Texas in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Visionary Rumor at the Roswell Museum in Roswell, NM, and Too Many Cunning Passages at Glass Box Gallery in Seattle, WA. He has exhibited work nationally at the Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas, and Gallery 4Culture in Seattle, WA, among others. Alex has received numerous accolades, including the Milnor Roberts Merit Scholarship through the University of Washington, the Centrum Emerging Artist Residency in Fort Worden, WA, and the M.K. Hage Endowed Scholarship in Fine Arts through the University of Texas, Austin. Public collections featuring his work include the University of Washington Print Collection and the University of Washington Life Sciences Building.
