NARANJO 141 is pleased to present Archive, a solo exhibition of new works by Justin Chance (b.1993, New York). This exhibition marks the artist’s first solo presentation in Mexico. 

Qualifying the distant and administrative connotations of its title (among other things), Archive is an exhibition comprised of Years, a series of 12 by 12 inch checkerboard paintings referencing the months on the calendar and numbers on a clock, Exes, beaten and restored pinatas of arbitrarily selected years between 1993 and 2023, Guests, two quilts depicting timescaped landscapes and Dating, an installation of daily dated drawings installed across the gallery’s newly inaugurated space THE NOOK. 

In Years, what initially appears to be repeated patterns of squares reveal incongruities upon closer inspection— blotches, pocks, and inconsistencies depart from the works’ geometric structure. Comparing the first painting to the last in the series, an evolution that was barely perceptible from one period to the next becomes apparent. The rigidity of the calendar or the clock is eroded by the elusiveness of lived experience. 

In Guest (I) and Guest (II), subtly-dyed timestamps sit atop cloudy silk landscapes. No AM or PM stamp is visible on the incomplete digital numeric display, and there is no indication of where the sun sits on the horizon. The viewer is left to parse a memory that has been drained of clear consciousness of time. And in Archive, a thin layer of silk is painstakingly embroidered with DNA strands; a piece of delicate fabric becomes embedded with a million year’s old biological index, an implication of the interlocking threads of happenstance and heredity. 

The show’s seven sculptures, each titled Ex, find banal grey piñatas smashed and preserved using book conservation techniques under layers of resin and varnish accompanied by a series of glossy photographs that document the revelry that took place. The broken piñatas reflect natural inclinations to recall and represent hardships foremost in retrospect. 

In the gallery’s THE NOOK lies Dating: an installation of nineteen works on paper mounted on canvas that were made in direct reference to the artist’s time in residence. Like the horizontal weave of a floor loom operated for days, or the image produced by an inkjet printer gradually revealing the image through accumulation, the drawings were outlined first and then colored in and dated an inch a day. The final images accrue with the passage of time. Jokes, puns and playful gestures express themselves from behind the bars of their strictly regimented execution. 

Chance’s Archive presents the challenges, growths and unpredictabilities that are accessible through the fragmented practice of preservation; as well as the precarities of memory and the everyday. As vessels for information as well as incidence, the title’s clinical aura gives way to the emotional stores contained within it. Culled from histories both individual and collective, the works in Archive point to the blind spots left by the disfiguring effect of memory and the arbitrary ways we catalog experience. 

Text by Ben Adams-Keane

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