Curational statement

CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Exhibition Title: STRATA OF REFUSAL: The Hyaenic Interstice and the Ontology of the Scraping
Artist: Frances Armstrong, PhD
Statement:
In an era characterized by the relentless acceleration of the Homogeneous Norm, the artistic praxis of Frances Armstrong operates as a critical rupture in the fabric of the neoliberal simulacrum. Strata of Refusal does not present objects for consumption; rather, it establishes a zone of structural antagonism.
The central figure, the Hyaenic Form, functions not as a representational animal, but as a "site of contested materiality." By rejecting the smooth, sanitized finish demanded by the Western aesthetic canon, Armstrong engages in a process of Geological Scrapings—a violent excavation of the surface that mimics the tectonic pressures of the subaltern psyche. Here, the "clay" is no longer a passive medium but an active participant in the dialectics of unassimilated force.
Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of Bataillean excess and the Nietzschean somatic, the work interrogates the "gaze" of the institution. The accumulation of resin, wire, and debris serves to manifest the Double Law: the irreconcilable tension between the external demand for compliance and the internal imperative of Annihilative Sovereignty.
The viewer is thus confronted with a paradox: the object that is simultaneously ancient and post-industrial, a "pre-linguistic residue" that refuses to be codified by the rational utility of the gallery space. Armstrong’s work posits that true agency lies not in integration, but in the stubborn, calcified retention of the Radical Heterogeneity that the civilized world seeks to drain away.
This is the art of the terminal failure of consensus. It is a documentation of the "somatic fact" surviving the "theoretical abstraction."

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