Possible Projects is pleased to announce benefit of the doubt, new work by Slinko.

“a benefit of the doubt is a tricky thing. can be exhilaratingly optimistic. can be dangerously devastating. what we are talking about here is really a leap of faith. something committed against better judgement, against the grand, cool and ruling Reason. something like spending your summer in Utica, NY.

staying in this forgotten, deteriorating post-industrial relic, it is easy to be tempted by despair. it is easy and even encouraged to drown that despair in heavy clouds of tobacco, steep it in Saranac and Jameson. but trapped in the innards of this Rust Belt town, one can still give a benefit of the doubt to its hopelessness. give it a hard long look, stare at the crumbling walls, deteriorating roads, and lush ungovernable overgrowth. peer so intensely that seconds become hours, years. as if severely stoned for the first time, everything around you re-rendering itself in high definition. precise in every little detail, insignificant, banal objects gaining mysterious grandiosity with the aid of detachment. the clarity of all logic, ideals, structure instantly disperses through little fissures of disintegrating asphalt, tracking down every possible direction leading to this degraded paradise. it can take billions of seconds.

we often gravitate towards places of high culture and hyper activity, the centers of everything. Paris, London, New York, where good food, well dressed people, and intellectual stimulation inject shots of certainty into the collective confidence. what a fractured, depleted place like Utica could possibly offer anyone? perhaps, it could bring credence to questioning of that sureness.

once a rival of Boston and New York City it is now trapped in history. like an incarcerated dream, its faded glory is tortured by desire for beauty. it is steadily taking a leap of faith that is not a leap at all, but a slow build up of doubts in layers and heaps tediously covering and swallowing up the certainty of its own existence.”

Slinko

Possible Projects is open on Mondays from 11-6pm and by appointment