Churner and Churner is pleased to present “Mutual Immanence,” an exhibition of new paintings by Lisi Raskin. Ranging in size from 4 feet to 2 inches – some small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand – these paintings reconstitute fragments of material, line, and shape that have been torn from their original sources and at times refuse to assemble themselves into stable images. Here Raskin uses the language of abstraction to resist easy resolution and inflect the works with a strongly felt tenderness.

Raskin has previously traveled to the Arctic Circle, former East German and Yugoslav Atomic bunkers, and through the American West exploring the intersections of oral histories, nuclear-age fears, utopian mythologies, and the architectures of the Cold War. While she continued this work during a 2013 trip to Afghanistan made possible through a Creative Time Global Residency Grant and the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, she has also sharpened her focus by studying radical pedagogy and attending activist trainings. These roads have led Raskin to a deeper awareness of the normative and conservatizing culture that attempts to subjugate her and appropriate her output even as she benefits from unearned privilege.

While in Afghanistan, Raskin visited and photographed the museum of the Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation in Kabul, the ruins of Darul Aman Palace, and Herat’s Jihad Museum, among other sites, collecting over 15,000 photos. What she exhibits on her return, however, are not the images themselves, but paintings through which she recasts her experience of these sites through a somatic use of materials in her studio. The provisional nature of Raskin’s materials also speaks to the complex and precarious state of the socioeconomic, nationalistic, gendered, and bureaucratic choreography that characterized her trip. The eros within these new paintings reform her aesthetic influences to include some semblance of what has been lost amidst the fragmented residue of Soviet modernism and American exceptionalism transformed by years of war in Afghanistan.

With “Mutual Immanence,” Raskin continues her practice of using strategic ineptitude to expose her own ignorance, doubt, and blind spots, but she does so in a more informed and delicate manner. Her aim is to utilize her own failings to undo the notion of a static, empirical truth, leading us to see our positions and our conclusions as intrinsically connected.

Concurrent with her exhibition at Churner and Churner, Raskin has created a large-scale, sitespecific environment at Art in General at 79 Walker Street. Part of the New Commission series, “Recuperative Tactics” is an immersive installation that sutures found materials into an architectural palimpsest, transforming the gallery into the site of an attempted reconstruction of memory, riddled with the complicated cyphers of an outsider’s account of the vestiges of war.

Since 1998, Lisi Raskin’s on-site research has informed the making of paintings, drawings, objects, videos, and large, constructed environments that she has exhibited internationally at institutions including Kunsthaus Graz, Casino Luxembourg, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Contemporary Art Center Vilnius, MoMA PS1, the Blanton Museum of Art, and the Center for Curatorial Studies/Hessel Museum at Bard College. Her web projects have been published in Triple Canopy magazine, as part of the Dia Foundation web projects, and on Creative Time Global Reports, where she is a regular contributor. She has built large-scale environments at the 11th Istanbul Biennale, the 2nd Athens Biennale, and the 3rd Singapore Biennale.

Additionally, Raskin has embarked on projects that deliberately explore the intersections between utopian architecture, community connectivity, and art pedagogy, including an ongoing collaboration with artist Kimberly Kay. Under the working title of MOTORPARK, Raskin and Kay are in the process of transforming a 1996 Bluebird school bus into a mobile, programmable project space.

Raskin was born in Miami, Florida. She received her BA in Fine Arts from Brandeis University in 1996 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2003. Raskin and her work have been the subject of reviews and articles in publications such as Artforum, Flash Art International, the New York Times, and Art Lies, among others. Raskin is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in Philadelphia, PA.