Dennis Balk: You’re Welcome/Rodrigo Morales/The Complete Files

Rodrigo was pure ambition, an attitude that pervades his participation throughout the timeline of the Seven Eleven events. At Pratt Institute, years earlier, he pursued the challenge of rendering topical, cultural moments in graphic, color-saturated visuals. His instructors deemed his work irrelevant to the greater concerns of the conceptually-theoretical discourse of that period. Rodrigo graduated with little encouragement. Rebounding, Rodrigo became consumed by the recognition of commerce as a thin veneer influencing the prickly, predisposed virtues expressed in a variety of aesthetic disciplines. Depicting the world as a visual state of being requires retrieving the chunky debris isolated within the landscape of commercial utility and animating these fragments to become tools of the palette as opposed to merely crafting a visual, pop-social critique. He gained his stride with commercial clients, and together with a couple of colleagues, he formed a loose collective of freelance designers. It was these two colleagues who collaborated on the extended t-shirt projects. In the temporary confinement of the convenience market, the freelancers diligently continued with the design work. Despite their incessant effort to correspond with the client—after confirming the tech was fully functioning—they never received any type of reply or confirmation. Within the series of Seven Eleven events and the set of complete files, unanswered questions are not necessarily fodder for conspiracy. However, after extensive interviews and the technical and operational verification of the outgoing message capability, the whereabouts and identity of the alleged client(s) remain unknown. The additional complication of the point-of-sale register with the reconfigured motherboard led to the suggestion that it could have been the portal for the incoming open- channel stream phenomenon, which subsequently became the pinnacle of controversy. After the seven large panels of the rogue stream were eventually printed and decrypted to reveal the shocking discovery of the previously unknown DNA codes, the unexplained issue of the client remains a piece of the story that requires continued investigation. The timeline of the Seven Eleven events remains peppered with problematic issues regarding what was, in fact, sent in advance of the incoming DNA material. And did these simple design files produced by Rodrigo and his colleagues serve as an initial form of contact? To whom and to where? What exactly was Rodrigo exporting?

[NAME] Publications presents the exhibition, You’re Welcome/Rodrigo Morales/The Complete Files, edited by Dennis Balk. Following the publication of Seven Eleven, The Complete Files (Channel 171), this exhibition is the first public offering of this digressive, culturally sensitive material. The exhibition includes the preparatory design compositions produced by Rodrigo Morales—a personality in the Seven Eleven chronicle—in the form of mood boards and t-shirt composition studies. Also included are several of the large panels that contain the cloaked, prose-like communication that streamed through the cash register during the event.

The author(s) of these peculiar transmissions remain unknown. For those unfamiliar with the story, Morales disappeared in the Nevada desert under what the investigators have called suspicious circumstances. There exists a direct connection between the Nevada occurrence and the files streamed through the cash register; however, the exact circumstances are yet to be determined. The material presented in the fabric prints will prove challenging to those who attend the exhibition with the intention of resolving outstanding clues in the ongoing investigation. The forthcoming Journal/ Document: My Seven Eleven/ Rodrigo Morales, produced for the exhibition by [NAME], will include the complete set of journals and interviews, including eyewitness accounts and a selection of previously unpublished critical backstories.

Dennis Balk is an artist currently living in Richmond, Virginia. He is currently the designer for the fashion collective, Splinter Group. He has held teaching positions at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Bangkok University International College, as well as at New York Institure of Technology, Bahrain Campus. Since the late 80s his digital prints, paintings, sculptures, theater, and installation works have addressed the conditions of narrative and the narrative aspects of historicizing the present. In New York Balk was represented by the seminal gallery, American Fine Arts.

Founded in 2008, [NAME] Publications is dedicated to making books with an emphasis on practices often marginalized in dominant art and design histories. The press facilitates the production of books by artists, designers, curators, and scholars with practices anchored in the Americas. It disseminates these titles and builds new audiences for them through exhibitions, public programs, and the salvaging of archival materials. You’re Welcome/ Rodrigo Morales/ The Complete Files is made possible through the generous support of Teiger Foundation and The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation.