Peter Fischli and David Weiss have a unique, whimsical perspective on the mundane material of everyday life. Since they began working together in 1979, the artistic duo set out to document and investigate their surroundings, juxtaposing the ordinary with the spectacular.

The room-filling installation, Untitled (Questions Projection, small) (1981–2001), comprises multiple projectors showing handwritten questions in German, English, Italian, and Japanese. Informed by the queries of Order and Cleanliness, it delves further into what Fischli and Weiss understood to be “popular opposites.” Combining the amusing with the earnest, varying texts covering the walls – crossing over and under one another, appearing only for a few seconds before being replaced by the next – allude to an inner monologue.

Developed as ongoing conversations, this collection accumulated while the duo worked on a particular idea and reflects Fischli and Weiss’ preference of the interrogatory to the declarative as well as their proclivity for phenomenological collecting. This body of work is complemented by eight performative photographs in which the duo lightheartedly explores Principles in the Everyday (1981); dressed in all white and all black – shadow images of Rat and Bear – they pose in different arrangements along with words describing contrary states and systems.

The film – shot on Super 8 – follows the odd couple of plush animals through Los Angeles as they embark on an exploration of the art world’s idiosyncrasies. In its course, a faux detective story involving a murder unfolds to a soundtrack that mixes pop songs and imitates popular film scores of the time. Providing the conceptual and material groundwork for the artists’ future joint practice, The Point of Least Resistance adopts archetypes of cinema that depend on a duo’s comic opposition to open artistic and philosophical examinations of false dichotomies like fiction versus reality or labor versus leisure.

In all works on view Rat and Bear examine the facets of daily life, attempting to bring “light into the darkness” and to find logic in a chaotic world. Probing the framework of reality itself, the eccentric characters function as integral ciphers for the entirety of Fischli Weiss’ collaborative projects.