Present Company begins its fall 2012 exhibition program with Lightness of Being, a group exhibition featuring Catherine Czacki, Pablo Guardiola, Donna Huanca and Luke Stettner, four interdisciplinary artists currently working out of Mexico City, New York, San Diego and San Francisco.

Lightness of Being focuses on a small cross-section of artists expanding the post-studio mantra, both by distorting its aesthetic and reconsidering its forms of production. Twenty years after artists such as Francis Alÿs or Gabriel Orozco worked within the daily experience to create subtle, poetic – and often political – gestures and interventions, significant shifts in our global culture have changed the aura and infrastructures of site, city and architecture as well as the individual’s social relationship to each of these spaces.

This new generation of artists has evolved alongside different world events that have not only informed but also dictated a particular form of artmaking, whether through practicality or by sheer necessity. In the U.S. for example, the end of the Clinton Era, 9/11, or the financial crisis of 2008 have all in part accentuated different positions on how art should function and furthered the distances of where it could be made. One such position, divided in terms of intent, objectivity and space, is a resurging affinity towards ephemeral and situational modes of artmaking, followed by the intrinsic dichotomy of rendering these often-intangible, intimate experiences and re-presenting them to a broader public.

Perhaps better steeped in conceptualism rather than the now popular spirit of social practice, this group of artists shares a disinterest in commerce production but also adopts formalist variations (or mutations) that step between the thin lines of politics and poetry, event and expression. By looking at an incision of this broader trajectory, it is apparent that style comes by way of arranging various, distinct experiences rather than by serial production or repetition. Working primarily with found objects, photography, sculpture and video, it is also important to note that Czacki, Guardiola, Huanca and Stettner all have a deep history in collaboration, critical writing, sound art as well as online media projects.