July 25 – August 29, 2026
Opening reception: July 25, 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm
We are pleased to announce State of Impermanence, Nico Chodor's first exhibition with the gallery. Presented in conjunction with Carter Potter: Picture Snatcher, both exhibitions open on Saturday, July 25, with an artists' reception from 2:00–5:00 pm at as-is.
Identity documents are strange and estranging things. A permanent resident card for example, bearing an image and text, printed and formatted according to obscure but (we assume) official standards, assigns its bearer an identity, a status, and a place that has nothing to do with the bearer’s own heimat. The identity document identifies its bearer, assigns him an identity.
This abstraction of legal status from self—like that of borders from landscape—has an aesthetics, too. The color photograph, the seal, the text, the holographics. And behind the text, ornamental but also apparently functional, counter-counterfeiting—the intricate, overlapping guilloche lines. Chodor, who in his movements between nations and continents has been identified via passports, visas, and work permits, has witnessed the variations of these patterns across space and time. The meshwork shifts with each new issuance, each new designation of self.
In his new body of work, Chodor disentangles the layers of these patterns and disarticulates them from their source documents. He isolates the elements of the patterns, draws them out (literally, by hand), scales them up, and places them next to each other. It’s a process that seems an inversion of an ID’s function: here, the person extracts and recontextualizes aspects of the document, not the other way around.
Most patterns on ID documents across the globe are produced by a single company in the Netherlands; the marker of nationality is an import. We’re reminded: the pure nation-state is a fiction.