Death Production: The Archive of Janna Flessa
Executed by Nick Flessa

February 10 - March 24, 2018
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive

Press
Exhibition Info
Exhibition Essay by Maite Muñoz Iglesias

Nick Flessa performs the production and execution of his mother's archive in exhibition format, including a reading area and additional programming at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. Enunciating a hidden poetics, he collaborates with the physical traces of her finished and unfinished works. The contents of the archive show the merging of an individual voice with mass-produced, prosumer technologies and surfaces, re-imagined by the artist as family archivist. This is a multimedia archive and exhibition including prefabricated running journals, watercolor painting, drawing, poetry, fiction, unfinished books, recipe cards, audio recordings, video, and additional ephemeral objects. It will be accessible at LACA during the course of its exhibition before it is returned to its home in Clermont County, Ohio.

This archive is a generative space for a fragmented production cut short by death. It is here reanimated by its living executor to emphasize what was unspoken in the life of its subject: mental illness, spiritual fatigue and internalized self-destruction within a regional white patriarchy. But also the personal and quotidian: poetic appreciations as documents of lived experience, a focused personal art practice and a cosmic bond with the family dog.