Friedman Benda is pleased to announce Titus Kaphar’s ‘The Vesper Project’. The exhibition is a massive sculptural statement—an encompassing installation, in which Kaphar’s own work is seamlessly woven into the walls of a 19th-century American house.
The culmination of an intense five-year engagement with the lost storylines of the Vesper family, the project was “birthed in a state of extended disbelief,” according to Kaphar. As the artist’s muses, the members of the Vesper family and their histories are intertwined with Kaphar’s autobiographical details, and layered with wide-based cultural triggers of identity and truth in the context of historical accounting.
In ‘The Vesper Project’, period architecture, gilt frames, a vintage typewriter, a neglected wardrobe, and old photographs act as seemingly recognizable elements, but by employing every tool of his trade, Kaphar insinuates doubt and transports the viewer into a disrupted mental state. As the house fractures, so does the viewer’s experience. In so doing, Kaphar compresses times, conflates the continuum of history and postulates new powerful realities.
With many of Kaphar’s interventions present in the installation including slashing, silhouetting, and whitewashing, this singular work is a complex map of overlapping timetables and collective genealogies. By obliterating the distance between the viewer and the work, ‘The Vesper Project’ is comprehensive, experiential, and it is the artist’s most ambitious expression to date.
