This exhibitions operates through a series of gentle distinctions and hard blockages – in space as in language
In the word discreet, as in careful or private, two e’s touch in the middle. In discrete, as in separate, the t enacts the meaning of the word, keeping the e’s apart. Pedants are fond of correcting the misuse of these two related yet independent terms, but poets and artists know that language’s concreteness is a material to be worked with. In Lot C, a doubleheader show by Jason Hirata and Park McArthur, a transcription from the opening of McArthur’s text Day (2023–) lines the gallery wall, while a spoken-word iteration in Italian – for English speakers, there’s a printed booklet and QR code linking to a YouTube video – plays intermittently: “Ti devo una giornata in spiaggia. Ci vediamo al parcheggio C?” (“I owe you a day at the beach. Do we meet at parking lot C?”)
It continues: “All’acqua offriamo la nostra paura…” (“To the water we offer our fear…”) The visitor’s point of access to this multitiered work is language, though its forms refuse to quite line up. Following the blue wall text around the gallery, like a horizon line, the words are interrupted by a break in the wall. On a storeroom door: ‘eleste app’, meaningless in English or Italian. Tracking left, a lone c is marooned on the corner of a pillar: ‘celeste’, then – ‘blue’ in translation, but also heavenly.
Lot C is the first collaborative exhibition between Hirata and McArthur, whose practices have been discursively and physically interdependent for over a decade. McArthur’s Kilometer Ramp (2026), a wood-and-metal ramp shown in its collapsed state, was made by Hirata so that McArthur could access a work by Walter De Maria at Dia Chelsea using her wheelchair. In fact, a constitutive part of both Hirata’s practice, and his wage labour, is to make work for other artists. In the Lot C press release Hirata describes his artmaking as ‘subjection to something else’, an evocative phrase that teeters between romance and oppression, softened towards the former by its internal sibilance. ‘I owe you’ is the refrain McArthur uses in Day: a promise predicated on willing, forward-focused debt.
Installed in a separate part of the gallery to Kilometer Ramp is Hirata’s Bubblegum (2026), one of a series of works made remotely through the artist’s instructions to the gallery, in which large rubber bands of a type used to safely lift others’ bodies bind together supplies from Incurva’s storeroom. It looks a little like a samurai warrior and more like a maintenance worker’s cart. Elsewhere, McArthur’s photographs from Overlook Park (2017) and Summer 2014 (2024), depicting parking lots and picnic benches, are intermittently swapped at the discretion of the exhibition organisers, Saim Demircan and Giulio D’Alì Aula. Their unusually visible role extends a structure already present in the works: things are made, moved and exchanged via others.
Hirata’s Circle (2026) extends this structure beyond the gallery. A block of business cards, available outside even when the gallery is closed, asks: ‘Per favore, potrebbe portarci a fare il giro al Lazzaretto?’ (‘Could you please take us on a tour of the Lazzaretto?’) At the opening, as part of the Circle performance, a wheelchair-accessible car drove visitors around a car park at the tip of the host town, Trapani. Historically a site of quarantine, it’s now an informal gathering place. The instructions given to the driver were to drive there, not stop, and come back.
As a separate performance, Hirata asked the curators to bring a set of parking bollards, usually kept in the square outside the gallery, into the main space. They had to be promptly returned, and now spend their days being shifted around by frustrated motorists keen to control their own direction of travel. If this exhibition is dialogical, it is a dispersed conversation, one that operates through a series of gentle distinctions and hard blockages. Throughout, inside and across Lot C, the solidity of objects and language is made porous. The artists are listed as Jason Hirata, Park McArthur. A comma, not an ‘and’ or ampersand: a pause, a separation, a mark of relation.
Jason Hirata, Park McArthur: Lot C at Incurva, Trapani, 11 July – 8 November
From the October 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
