Featuring artists
Max Galyon
Jonathan Paul Gillette
Liz Linden
Jonathan Monk
Isabel Schmiga
Kant Smith
Julia Weist

Curated by
Christine Hou
Melinda Braathen

Kick the can functions as a metaphor for the joke. Jokes arrive in the threshold between the norm, what should exist, and what actually exists—this slippage is where much humor is generated. Isabel Schmiga’s Slip is a play on the fig leaf as a common art historical reference used to conceal embarrassment or obscenities. Schmiga upends this commonly used trope by cutting the leaves into the shape of hands, suggesting something other than what was initially intended. In "Kick The Can’t," each artist uses a particular language to build from a conventional known, or as Paolo Virno calls it in Jokes and Innovative Action: For a Logic of Change, "a normal everyday frame of life.” Jonathan Paul Gillette’s upside down rainbow overturns a common symbol along with it is varied meanings, casting inquiry to its form and exhaustive history—in short, a more satisfactory sign.

"Kick The Can’t" approaches the joke as being codependent with the norm. The joke grafts itself onto the norm and reforms it, calling to focus humor, questions, and a new mode in which to perceive the everyday.