Springsteen is excited to present Ready to Drop, an exhibition featuring work by Body by Body, Bradford Kessler, Erin Jane Nelson, and text by Ed Fornieles. Please join us for the opening reception on Saturday, January 30, from 7-10pm. The exhibition will be on view through March 12, 2016.

"It describes the state of mind from which all unessentials have been stripped, leaving it receptive to everything around it, but impatient with trivial obstructions. To be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality, looking up."
--Nancy Holmes, Esquire magazine

A fetish is a portal generator into another world, a potential reframing of reality by investing objects with hidden powers. These inanimate objects are worshiped for their supposed magical powers because they are considered to be inhabited by a spirit.

The magical dimensions of fetish creation are hazy at best. The creation of a fetish relies on a glitch rather than a rule. It is often a subconscious build up that will open a fetish portal, which the subject has very little conscious control over. Yet interestingly immersion and exposure are able to trigger the obsession; it is only in this element of the process that the subject can be said to have control over it.

Once the fetish is recognized and accepted, the goal then becomes to reach a place of deep immersion within the fetish, at that point you transcend your position for a moment: Your obsession distorts your sense of scale. Rational concerns become reduced in significance; they are all walled off and temporarily unreachable. While the fetish field expands temporarily occupying the vacuum in your agency, it instills a new rubric for desire and repulsion, intention and action. It is this feature of the fetish zone that is the most terrifying from the outside, but the most rich from the interior.

Fetishes act as portals to hidden meanings and values, they punctuate the fabric of reality, allowing access to different dimensions. A near total transition is conceivable, in which the world is redefined through the fetish node, not just for the individual, but for the group, redefining the cultural landscape.

A software sustained by the group, diffuses across the network, so that different people have different access, add ons and upgrades. My 14 year old self needed Harmony Korine, The Offspring and Edward Hopper, which as it happens was also what was immediately available to me. It appears that on one level all products have corrupt or false roots, and their value is articulated in use not any central lineage.

In the sci-fi novel Solaris by Stanslaw Lem, the surface of the planet holds a living ocean that interacts with visitors who come within its orbit. The planet taps into their subconscious, manifesting people, objects and animals that resonate from their past. It is in this sense that the forms of Solaris makes apparent the fetish object; distilling a matrix of contradicting hopes, anxieties and desires. For a moment the fetish object allows these contradictions to be held in stasis, manifesting itself into into a singular form that the subject can at last enter into dialogue with. The fetish object becomes a site where a unique set of relations are established, This is significant because ultimately it is an interaction between a subject and another part of themselves, an interaction that would otherwise be impossible.

-Ed Fornieles

Body by Body is a collaboration between Cameron Soren and Melissa Sachs, who live and work in New York, NY. Selected solo exhibitions: Eli Ping Frances Perkins, New York (2015); Mission Comics, San Francisco (2015); Levy Delval, Brussels (2014); Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2014). In fall of 2015 they wrote and produced the opera BDSMozart, which was commissioned by Rhizome and presented as part of Performa15.

Bradford Kessler lives and works in New York, NY. Selected solo exhibitions: Ashes/Ashes, Los Angeles (2015); 247365, New York (2014); Welcome Screen, London (2014). Selected group exhibitions: MonCHÉRI, Brussels (2015); The Duck, Berlin, curated by M/L Artspace (2015); Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, curated by Springsteen (2015); American Medium, New York (2015), 63rd-77th Steps, Bari (2015); Invisible Exports, New York, curated by AA Bronson & Michael Bühler-Rose (2014); Rowing, London, curated by Alex Ross (2014).

Erin Jane Nelson lives and works in Atlanta, GA. Selected solo & two-person exhibitions: Hester, New York (2015); Document, Chicago (2015); Important Projects, Oakland (2012). Selected group exhibitions: Centre For Style, Melbourne (2015); Favorite Goods, Los Angeles (2015); Bureau, New York (2015); Bad Reputation, Los Angeles (2015); Mission Comics, Oakland (2014); 321 Gallery, curated by Holly Stanton, Brooklyn (2014); Interstate Projects, curated by Important Projects, Brooklyn (2014).