Harkawik is pleased to announce The Allimbus Device, the momentous first run of a kinetic contraption by New York artist Joey Frank, exhibited alongside a series of new binary clock paintings. Allimbus is a place of no transition, where one moment does not bleed into the next, but is displayed alongside it. Allimbus is not a name, but a word coined by Frank to describe a state of constant resolution, one in which all possible paths are visible at all times. Like a video in which every frame is always viewable—time is splayed, and therefore traceable with the utmost precision.
Working against the clock is perhaps the most consistent medium in Frank’s practice. Often taking the form of marginalia and appearing on the edges of other unrelated activities, Frank’s works come from a place of time running out. To that end there is a fixation on the moment of change–whether it be the pool cue striking the ball, or the fly swatter killing its prey. The state of the object is one way immediately before the instant being portrayed, and another immediately after. No transition, no ambiguity, either on or off. In both of these cases–the billiard balls and the fly–the effect of the action does not eliminate the object, but exposes its separable nature. Six of the paintings in this show are explicitly clocks, but all of the works imply the duress of time passing. On The Allimbus Device, the hands tick clumsily in order to do so honestly.
—Georgica Pettus
