SOM GALLERY is delighted to announce The Order of Things, a group show including Jim Lambie, Jack Coulter, Yuichi Higashionna, Etsuko Watanabe, and Rui Suzuki on view from November 13 to December 6.

Things have their proper place.

Music belongs to the ear, color to the eye. Flowers belong in vases, light in rooms. Objects have names, and names carry meaning. We accept these arrangements without question, and the world maintains its order. But when music becomes painting, cosmetics are transferred onto canvas, and ornament loses its purpose, where do things go?

In The Order of Things (1966), Michel Foucault argued that the systems through which we classify and understand the world are epistemically constructed. Drawing on a fictional encyclopedia described by Jorge Luis Borges, in which animals are arranged into peculiar categories, Foucault questions the very ground upon which disparate things can be brought together as a semaphoric whole.

This exhibition explores where things belong and what happens when they cross the limits of their categorical boundaries. In Lambie’s hands, cosmetics become the material that forms the surface of a painting.Coulter experiences music as color through synesthesia, transcribing sound into the palimpsest of painting. In Suzuki’s work, flowing paints and artistic intention intersect to create a free verse of forms. Higashionna transforms the familiar motif of domestic curtains into painting, revealing the uncanniness concealed within everyday surroundings. Watanabe transforms ordinary scenes and existing images into painting, moving between figuration and abstraction, reality and fiction, to create new pictorial definitions of their own.

Gathered in a single space, what do we see? The works of five artists or the order through which we understand them as one exhibition? We may be surprised to see a commonplace object become a sculpture, yet the moment we accept it as such, perhaps we are reassured of their hitherto unexpected significance. Does art liberate things from an existing order or continually impose another upon the world?: These things that did not originally belong together but having arrived with their own purpose, its own time, its own place? Cosmetics, music, water, curtains, and images transformed through painting. Yet a curious paradox emerges.

As works of art, these things are removed from their familiar contexts. Yet they acquire new identities as art, and are classified once again.

Beside colors born of cosmetics are colors born of music. Near the traces left by water, curtains that would ordinarily divide a room lose their function, while familiar scenes take on another reality through painting. Things have their proper places, so we once believed. Yet here we are, looking at things that once belonged elsewhere, now gathered in a single room. And the name given to that room -a proper place- is itself another form of order.