AAAgent presents: Where the Room Isn't

Where The Room Isn't continues Joel Freeman's multi-year interventions across the building that houses Commonwealth and Council, and now, AAAgent: a succession of three doors along the corridor that open to enclosed facades, once passageways to the exhibition space that have since been sealed off. The room isn't the only thing to have disappeared; in 2020, Freeman's then-studio and the former gallery space of Visitor Welcome Center were charred by a fire from a restaurant below, both spaces eventually, ostensibly abandoned (ostensibly because, without permission from the landlord, Freeman continued to document the space, as well as produce new works and exhibitions within it). Through a series of displacements, repetitions, and chiasmatic reversals, Freeman finds a new in-between space within which to house his works in AAAgent's triple doors—whose opening and shutting mimic the structure of a book, which for years has been Freeman's primary visual language. Held within them are an intaglio print pulled from the long-broken men's bathroom mirror, inscribed with over a decade of graffiti; one-to-one photocopies-made-lithographs of the soot-stained shirt that caught on the jagged floor cut out by firefighters to access the burning restaurant below; and the accumulated notations of a year of sketchbook pages from the year in which Freeman continued to experiment in new media in and around his "abandoned" studio, with text accumulating onto itself in a way that renders it illegible. Each gesture is something like the line from the Ursula K. Le Guin's translation of the Tao Te Ching that reads, "Where the pot's not / is where it's useful," referencing the fact that it's precisely the pot's emptiness that renders it useful, a line Freeman underlined some years ago in concert with his ongoing annotation series whereby all text is redacted except for his notes. The mirror that once reflected countless faces now bellies up white, its once-mirror image the page itself onto which it's printed. That which faces it within the doorframe, the shirt, inhabits the language of rubbings and frottage, a print of the space it shimmied through and was torn by. Both embody a self-portraiture now characterized by absence, or, at best, of residue. At the very moment of its making, the print destroys the primary function of the object rendered (the mirror no longer reflects, the shirt is torn, notes can no longer be read). The impression or copy becomes a byproduct of a gesture more so than a record of the thing itself, its obsessive repetition rendering its indexicality absurd. (Not featured in this exhibition but implicitly referenced in each work exhibited, for one year Freeman photographed the same, iteratively wheatpasted poster on the building's exterior, which read simply "This is the record of the time," after Laurie Anderson's piece by the same name.) And so the thing of it, the pot, the room, is only ever offset. Our capacity to understand the spaces we traverse is approximated through our attempts to feel it out. And in this haptic empathy, again and again across time, sometimes we ourselves disappear. —Serena Caffrey