b'MK GuthSocial ObjectsEssence HardenThe social potentiality of art has been a principal interest for MK Guth. Objects, the lendersof these social moments, are Guths navigational tools, anchoring interactions through theirvessel-like capacity; transforming individualism to communalism through a series of guided acts. Instructions as suggestionsGuth always allows room to overlook or disregardare presented through performance (Shout, Recount, Get Drunk, 2016), installation designations (Best Wishes, 2011), and in text-based pieces (Instructions for Engaging with Clouds, 2017). These realms of art as a social scape yield to both the possibilities of collaborationguest and artist participate in multitudes of call and responsewhile attesting to the specificity of context.Objects, performances, and installations morph as engagement swells and collapses throughout an exhibitions run. That is, these are and are not time-based pieces; they exist between discrete matters and living ones, marking the eager, hesitant, and unwitting as patrons.Guth has recently been following these interactive proclivities through prose and books in particular. In A Memory About (2018) and What Needs to Be Said (2017), two book projects, guests are presented with the gift of authorship. One is invited to sit with these blank books in the gallery and in response to the prompt of the titles, to propose ones thoughts and ones vision within the bound cover of each serialized text. Adventure, Place, Sorrow, Happiness, and Love are subtexts that exist within A Memory About, and art, ecology, identity, love, and politics are the series within What Needs to Be Said. At one thousand pages each, these reserves accumulate what they can (they are not infinite in this sense) as individual manuscripts, and then shift, once full of peoples writings, to a composite object fastened and sealed with ribbon. These directives work as personal remedies first and then move toward collective envisionment in shuttering a books pages but offering the language of the spine as a means for continued reflection. As a serial, the texts are stacked vertically, marking these columned spines into prose, prose that prompts you to consider what you will contribute to the psychic realm on locality, feeling, and journeying. Together with the lithographic print Instructions for Engaging with Clouds (2017) and the installation Menu for a Table (2018)both of which present directives/meditations on the subjects of their titlesGuth hands us reflective moments of active engagement.40'