A list imposes order and creates equivalency between things listed. To date, Species has exhibited fifty-one artworks by eleven artists in a total of five exhibitions. On August 20th, 2016, Species will present “Spalt Spelt Spelter,” a solo exhibition by Josh Minkus.

The word spalt comes from spalten, to split, meaning brittle wood, prone to splitting. Spalting is the discoloration of wood caused by fungi. Though a fungus typically weakens a hardwood, spalted wood is prized by wood workers for visual effect—white rot, zone lines, bluestain. And spalt as variant of spelter, crude smelted zinc, zinc alloy, or just zinc. So a metaphor maybe, disease made decorative virtue, the symbiotic rhizome, and quite literally, sculptures made of zinc.

Minkus composes inventories of many small sculptures around rectilinear hubs sized after 11x17 tabloid paper, human-scaled points of registration. A correlative is drawn between the sculptural objects and poetic text. The letters of a word, the words on a page, line breaks and stanzas as containers and vehicles. Not that raw material = letter or word, but that the structural circuit board of tactile and symbolic stuff, scaled to something relatable like the twiddling of fingers, if not to the trundling of a human body, takes us from here to there, like moving across a page, or leafing through. Bounded things and their total. Items on a list and the list itself.
 
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Josh Minkus (b. 1985 Elk, CA) lives in Hamilton, NY. Recent exhibitions include Bodega, New York; Pied-à-terre, Ottsville PA; Right Window, San Francisco; Sydney, Sydney; and Centre for Style, Melbourne. Past exhibitions include Important Projects, Oakland, and Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn.