Building on a pivotal warehouse-wide solo show at Pump Project in Austin, Complex 2 extends the Complex exhibition series to The Southwest School of Art through large scale architectural interventions, figurative imagery, and a radical, anti-passive approach to art viewing and curation. The porous nature of these works and their environment disrupt the boundaries between art and the outside world, dissolving the notion of viewership as something that is donned before entering exhibition space and discarded after — or even between individual discrete works. Complex 2 encourages a more fluid form of viewership. In the type of exploration needed to traverse the exhibition, human curiosity can be stoked, human yearning can be invoked, and discovery becomes possible.

Through non-linear, but conceptually linked experience, the exhibition facilitates an awareness of the construction of meaning. Several of the works on exhibition unfold in one way when first viewed, but given a new vantage point deeper into the complex their meaning fundamentally shifts, emotionally flavored by the physical change in the viewer's position. The second experience taints the first, muddling into understanding — less defined, less sure, but more rich and nuanced.

The exhibition requires a circulation of viewers to fully activate, and in this way harnesses the personality of it's community while simultaneously bringing into question the boundaries of one's own person and hierarchical distinctions of society, institution, social circle, and individual.

-Southwest School of Art Galleries