Rivington Arms is pleased to present YOU ARE NOTHING TO ME. YOU ARE LIKE AIR. Leigh Ledare’s second New York solo show and the artist’s first exhibition with Rivington Arms. This show consists of video, photography, sculpture and works on paper.

YOU ARE NOTHING TO ME. YOU ARE LIKE AIR. asserts a series of outward movements from the core interests explored within Ledare’s critically acclaimed book and exhibition, Pretend You’re Actually Alive, 2008. This show departs from the book while using its contents, Ledare’s searingly intimate relationship with his mother, as an expansive index to explore motifs emerging around issues of representation, authorship, and valences of exchange. In his work Ledare examines the ongoing formation of subjectivity in relation to broader psychological, cultural, and economic drives. This show emphasizes collaboration as a means of reassigning agency, extending the scope of Ledare’s previous work to include collaborations outside his relationship with his mother.

Ledare suggests his mother’s complicated subjectivity stems not from her failure to perform various roles but from an occupation of an abundance of imagined modes, rooted in the performative, that cannot be reconciled. Inhabiting elements of his mother’s logic, Ledare consciously moves beyond biography. His recent body of work develops out of an interest in creating an affective approach towards photography and video, making aware the ways in which social interactions create spaces for the emergence of the subject.