Biggest Little Kisses

Baitball #2

January 17 – March 15, 2022

Palazzo San Giuseppe in Polignano a Mare / Italy

Biggest Little Kisses

In 1859, Virginia City, Nevada was regarded as the destination to the west that San Francisco is now. Silver was found. A community resembling the traditional motifs of the American West was cultivated. On the outskirts of town, a silver refinery known as the American Flats was constructed, used, and destroyed. A place where miners shared a work force became an abandoned landscape where written scripts of graffiti were shared, understood, and written over repeatedly. Like all the deserted mining towns in Nevada, the American Flats holds a mystical energy with vivid apparitions. Mining has displayed a history of eradicating indigenous tribes and land, exploiting labor, and forging manifest destiny nightmares. We are left living in spaces shared with ghosts and arsenic waste. The American Flats were excavated in 2015. Virginia City now is merely a strip mine still being scrapped for anything leftover. It survives as a small town generating its revenue as a subsidiary tourist destination to Reno, Nevada. Known as the Biggest Little City, Reno was brought on by the silver rush and westerners that chose to stay, or that were trapped by the mountains on the way to California. From silver, to slot machines, to neon hotels, the second rate Las Vegas, Reno has experienced several “renovations,” from the Comstock, to the Casinos, to the suburban sprawl, and now by development agencies from Colorado and San Diego. Just like the American Flats, Reno's historic ruins of the past have been uprooted and destroyed to make way for new gentrifiers, Tesla employees, and tourism. Iconic motels are now the dust below unaffordable “luxury” apartment buildings.

Two bear pelts resting on each other. Sacrificed symbols of survival, now an elaborate display of wealth at the cost of spiritual hauntings. A clam and it's pearl, a captured shimmering in the midst of the desert sand dunes. Bodies on grounds, bodies behind fences, bodies in fences, sights experienced by many. A mining rag, a window curtain, a keepsake blanket, a painting. A 49ers paint job rusting away to dreams of gold left up to chance with strangers. Gathered around tables we play games with cards, words, and stares.

Roll the die twice, these wall works by Ally Messer, Paolo Mentasti, Fiona McElhany, Henry MacDiarmid, Noah Greene, and Ashley Westwood, all include a strong pair. This collection of multiples demonstrates thoughts about commensalism and relationships. We are searching for a symbiotic interaction that encourages and returns the favor, positive and negative we are talking through sine waves and fault lines.

Biggest Little Kisses is our way of sharing the stories of our unexpected party guests. A reckoning for the recently demolished seminal wedding venue, Chapel of the Bells. So many artists together in a traditional guest book is a ritualistic way of commemorating a ceremony and those in attendance. By extending the invitation to artist’s we admire, we are invited to see how they interact with one another. The collection is a collage and archive of artworks, ephemera, things, and ideas that reference the shared feelings brought on by being immersed in Nevada for a point in time. A landscape of desert mountains, betting all in and losing, bright eyed 777 jackpots, neon stars, fake gold, the texture of stucco, celebrities refusing to be forgotten, wild mustangs and valleys of fire. From across the table, a toast from our seat to yours.

Baitball #2

Baitball is a hybrid, a crossbreed between a long-term project art fair and a collectively curated exhibition, it is a shared dimension, a way to live and co-evolve together through differences, dreaming up new worlds to become-with-others.

Baitball #2 involves 80 galleries, project spaces, artist-run spaces, collectives, curators and art institutions. Over 300 artists, activists and researchers were called to deal with the metaphorical image of a long table set for an imaginary collective lunch during which unfold speculations around the concepts of collaboration and self-organization through the act of sharing food and the practices of commensalism and conviviality.

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