Pocket Utopia is pleased to present “Emotional Infinity (Subtitling Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles)”featuring the work of Maggie Michael, with Michele Araujo and Will and Mary Pappenheimer in the project space, and a new print edition by Brece Honeycutt.

“Emotional Infinity (Subtitling Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles)” marks a shift for artist Maggie Michael toward text and sculpture. Michael weaves a groove between relationships and time by using marquis signs, a mirror, and vinyl records with custom-made engraved text, in a tone of time suspended.

A Washington, D.C. artist, Maggie Michael pieces together an inaudible soundscape of intense and desolate feelings reverberant with art, film and literary pasts. On the flipside, Michael arranges the presidential, the monumental and the still. Spreading out over the walls of the space, Michael allows references to Beuys and Houellebecq to resonate while her entire installation reads as a book from left to right. For Michael, the rhetorical and romantic, sound, sign and a little haute couture deconstruct into a well-written and performed language full of possibilities.

In the project space, Michele Araujo uses a variety of source imagery (albeit imbedded in an abstract vernacular) including J.M.Charcot’s studies of hysteria from the early 1900s, stills of the death scene from Bonnie and Clyde, a self-portrait of herself after an automobile accident, and stills from Fassbinder’s Year of Thirteen Moons, in her ink, acrylic, and collage on vellum tour de force. By photocopying, cutting and coloring, Araujo renders these performances and aftermaths unrecognizable making the resulting painting both otherworldly and explicit.

Also in the project space, Will and Mary Pappenheimer’s video installation “I’m not saying anything, you tell me what it means,” offers a rare and “Rorschachian” view of the Australian Bowerbirds. Acting as wacky ornithologists, bearing gifts of colored pom poms, the Pappenheimers follow the trail of the art maker of bird species, the Bowerbird, into the bush.

Brece Honeycutt’s print edition for Pocket Utopia is a two-paper layered weaving stitched in silver thread.