Opening reception: Saturday, July 7 | 6–9PM

In the months preceding their first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Berlin-based artists Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda endowed the prize for the “S-Class” show jumping championship in Ladeburg, Germany. Having worked together since 2002, Chung and Maeda’s presentation of the award marked the tenth anniversary of the artists’ collaboration, which began with Modus Tollens (2003), a work that framed their friendship as the basis of their artistic practice. The commemoration of the artists’ ten-year history extends the durational logic of this earlier project and points to their own artistic history as a potential working material. In this instance, the artists use the time that has elapsed over the course of their ongoing relationship as the starting point for a new artwork.

For the exhibition at REDCAT, Chung and Maeda present the ten flags that discretely framed the event in Ladeburg. Each flag depicts a different drawing of two horses wearing the same hat, accompanied by the words “10 Years of Jay & Q” in an ornate script. The flags take on an unassuming style and manner to render the commemoration of the artists’ career into an understatement, a gesture further reflected by the modest scale of the event in Ladeburg.

In addition, a new video produced for the exhibition at REDCAT translates a selection of recent and historical artists’ statements into a choreographed monologue performed by an actor. Culled together to form a single voice, the statements express an ongoing generational dissatisfaction and disillusionment with younger artists. Brought together in this context, the two projects by Chung and Maeda come to represent the processes by which an artist and artwork are deemed mature, and how a general fear of cultural decline and loss of idealism is inherited from one generation to the next.