Flat Pile Full of Sound

Full exhibitions details on blueboy.space

Nine is pleased to present Flat pile full of sound, a two person exhibition by Caleb Jamel Brown and Zack Rafuls.

Opening Reception
Friday, January 23rd, 6–9 PM

"In a national park somewhere, stolen rocks pile up in a monument to bad luck and second-guesses.

My grandmother went to Hawaii and snuck a rock into her suitcase, hardened lava, but mailed it back a month later. The consequences proved to be too much. Her rock joined the conscience pile: the towering mounds of stashed mementos shipped home by troubled minds.

Not dissimilar, in my bedroom, there’s still a bag from the hospital. The bag has made it clear that it’s not ready to be unpacked. It has stopped me each time I’ve tried. And there, mail too, a stack in front of the hamper, and another on the desk.

Sometimes, these objects will start humming: Vvvvvvvvv. That morning, when I got home, the dining room chair was still pulled out, forty-five degrees, with one leg hanging off the rug. I think about it now and can hear it buzz as well, occupied in a different sense. Later, when I folded the clothes, they hummed too.

And two falls ago, I visited the Pantheon. It was pouring rain through the oculus; drops splashed against the marble floor. Tiny, shimmering drums. We all watched together with our necks craned skyward. Hundreds of millions of droplets falling, our faces reflected in each. And the folded clothes were mirrors too, images rising to the surface of the fabrics: a flat pile full of sound. Photocopies, transfers."

(Text by Rusha Moon Bartlett)

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Caleb Jamel Brown (b.1993) is an interdisciplinary artist and plumber from Atlanta, GA, currently based in Bedstuy, NY. The Utilization of abstraction and vernacular as the foundation for larger cultural narratives is at the core of Brown’s practice, often working with photography, installation, printmaking, sculpture, painting, and video. His obsession with intersections of Black American material culture, representation through abstraction, visual vernacular, hand-me-down garments, and kitschy décor gives much of Brown’s work a devotional quality, in which the past and the lives of elders are preserved and celebrated through objects and artifacts.

Caleb is a 2022 Working Artist Project recipient and a 2020 Mint Leap Year Fellow. Caleb is an MFA candidate at Hunter College and holds a BFA from Valdosta State University. And has participated in residencies throughout the United States and abroad, including Shandaken: StormKing, New Windsor, NY; Mass MOCA; PATA, Lodz, Poland; Proyecto Ace, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Coleman Arts Center, York, AL; Aviario, Portugal.

‍Zack Rafuls is a mixed-media artist currently based in Queens, NY. Born in Miami, FL, in 1992, some of his earliest accomplishments include winning the 5th-grade Spelling Bee at Jack D. Gordon Elementary School, being named "Most Improved" at the Jane Forman Tennis Academy Summer Camp, and receiving the “Best Hair” superlative as a high school senior at Chattanooga Center for Creative Arts. Since then, he received his BFA from Watkins College of Art in Nashville, TN (2015), during which time he also studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a participant in the AICAD Mobility Program (2014). An interest in collaboration and community led him to found the artist-run space mild climate with a group of peers in Nashville, TN, in 2015, where he co-curated until 2018.