1. DENIAL 2. NEGOTIATION 3. ACCEPTANCE 4. BREAK-UP 5. REGRET 6. FORGIVENESS 7. MEMORY 8. SUBSTITUTION

Neither completely narrative nor primarily formal, Alejandro Cesarco’s installation Once Within a Room is at once the synopsis, the set, the characters, and the props of a story – a spatial configuration dominated by the phantoms of particular pasts. It presents the classic trope of lover, beloved, and the space between them in which the traces of two characters are staged but not made explicit. Some works within this configuration might be looked at as strategies of forgetting, others as indexes of the past-ness of the past. Souvenirs. Remains. What is to be remembered, that is, what is still standing between what was and what is no more. But also the ways in which we choose to, or can, remember the past. The general performative dimension of the installation derives from quotation, which attributes the elements of a story to fleeting remarks, at the same time enigmatic and familiar: a quality we could perhaps describe as that of emotional ready-mades. Once Within a Room was first presented in April/May 2008 at New Langton Arts, San Francisco. Other recent exhibitions include Retrospective, 2007 a body of work created in collaboration with John Baldessari as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative at Murray Guy 2007 and Margeurite Duras’ India Song at Art in General, New York 2006. Alejandro Cesarco was born in 1975 in Montevideo, Uruguay. He lives and works in New York.