Ilit Azoulay’s two works from the series Mousework will be exhibited in the group show Imperfect Crystal, at Moskowitz Bayse in Loas Angeles, along with works byJoe Biel, Charlie Goering, Anthony Miserendino, Joel Otterson, Cameron Spratley, and B. Thom Stevenson.

The exhibition will be on view at the gallery from July 9 -August 13, 2022. A public reception will be held on Saturday, July 9, from 6-9 pm.

Forgotten images and objects have ways of reaching us in incomplete states, laden with degraded facts, and out of step with their earlier selves, they yearn for resurrection from the consciousness graveyard. That scattered heap becomes its own metastatic archive, as the casted-off finds a worthy partner in the artist, magnetized by that essential willingness to reuse and reanimate visual scraps and orphaned information. Scavenged information becomes the charge of the rescuer, and fresh readings are applied accordingly. Imperfect Crystal brings together artists who consider these dimmed source signals, documents, and veins of mottled intentionality and refracted history. Through material transformation, images and objects return to us, their original meanings both fortified and acutely altered.

Utilizing historic symbols and relics of institutionalization and marginalization, Ilit Azoulay’s Mousework series contends with antiquated approaches to the now-outmoded diagnosis of female hysteria. Beginning with the photographic archives of Jean-Martin Charcot, the ethically fraught but pioneering neurologist and medical photographer, Azoulay considers his clinic’s staged and manipulated compendium of portraits of so-called hysterical women. Set in ovular, locket-like windows on the left-hand side of a foldout frame, the historical material is paired with a photographed found object on the right, and a digitally stitched collage in the work’s center. Tracking fluid attitudes through associative and loaded imagery, Azoulay’s Mouseworks trace a specific and wooly historical arc towards our own moment, exposing the looming shadows of historical malfeasances and the still-unresolved denials of agency that occasioned them.