Downtown, Los Angeles
Julien Archer
Slip
As IsAs-Is is pleased to present Slip, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with New York–based artist Julien Archer. In the front gallery, silver-leafed threads are drawn through grids of needles pressed into the walls. Each arrangement follows loose instructions that encourage structure to persist through variation. In the second room, there are six sheets of wax transfer paper. These record the lines and perforations left from drafting patterns and cutting cloth. Across both rooms, what’s here considers how a gesture made toward another form can generate its own identity—a network of decisions through which a self is continually assembled, adjusted, and undone. A slip is a way of crossing: a slip of the tongue, or a slip as garment, a layer between the body and the world. Fernand Deligny wrote that “a network is a mode of being,” noting how a simple passage—from masculine to feminine—transforms le mode, a way of doing, into la mode, fashion or style.