This is the first exhibition at Hours showing work by Jackson Beyda, Jan Kunkel and Joon Yeon Park. A newly founded and independent space, Hours sets out to develop new perspectives in visual art and text on contemporary political economy. In this show, the artists take on markets and monopolies, grappling with surplus value in everyday staples.

Jackson Beyda’s series of letterboxes made of cardboard feature a simple design in white and black, arranged in sets of two. Each of the boxes is cleanly folded but with rough edges. Some may contain private correspondence, doubly concealed by the outer case and the stamped envelope. Another lies wide open, inviting passersby to peek inside. Both the medium and the messages convey information that seems to become truer the more often it is repeated. But they are also relics from the past of bourgeois modernity. The postal system was one of the arenas in which the state exercised a monopoly, providing a public good. Each district has a postal code, each parcel a number with a nameplate. The perfect grid, charts out a map on which every subject has a precise location.

Joon Yeon Park’s work, by contrast, comes in a 1.64×2.00 meter fabric wall hanging that displays a mesh of large numbers arranged in squares, accompanied by two smaller frames containing a one and a zero. Her pieces reappropriate American artist Jasper Johns’s Numbers series, with the digits stitched onto a soft texture. Every number individually expresses a magnitude, taken together they form a code. Our brains are not made for processing large numbers. Without counting we can recognize only up to four items in a group. For larger sets, we have to guess. This is, unless they are already known to us. Like when looking at a six on a die. Here, reference points are essential. Depending on our previous experience or just the mood today, we find our individual strings. Every time we glance at it, the grid seemingly has rearranged itself and offers a new combination.

Jan Kunkel’s text, performed by the artist at the opening of the show, engages with very similar themes and puts them into a different form. In her piece, “Tuber and the Lumpen: A Little Lehrstück on the Contradictions of Cheap Life” she elicits the impact of this agricultural mainstay. The one-act play proceeds from a deceptively simple premise: reenactment is just reenactment. In it, one person is asked to follow and mimetically render a meandering train of thought, much like a musician interpreting a score. Yet this reading, the staging of multiple, antagonistic voices, is prone to breakdown. It’s a kind of epic joke, whose punchline is that there isn’t one. The play’s minimal framework for action is made up only of a pair of gentleman’s shoes and a potato sack, both objects that carry material history and symbolic weight.

The artists share a skeptical approach to the processes that shape our means of subsistence, exploring the structures in which the distribution of value is encoded. What at first appears to be a simple
formality can have unpredictable consequences down the line. And so, in their works, they ask quietly but emphatically – what is the right scale to better understand the accelerating mess around us that we have to accept as reality?