Curatorial Collaborative

February 7 - 13

11:30 playdate, a collaborative installation of works by Olivia Andrews and Ila Krishnamoorthy, serves as a physical and conceptual playdate between artist, curator, artwork, and viewer. The exhibition features entirely new works that exist in dialogue with one another and should be considered as a whole. 11:30 playdate contemplates youth, the passage of time, the formation of identity, and the awkwardness of becoming older. These objects manipulate the viewer, forcing them to crouch, look up, feel huge, or seem tiny. Viewers must, therefore, play along – reflect, participate, and self-situate in time and space. Fragments of both artists’ writing unfurl along the gallery’s walls on paper tinged by the remnants of sugary fruit strips that long ago stained the teeth of their young (or not-so-young) consumer. Their words are moments on a timeline, explorations of self, places seen, and stories heard – a jumble of prose perpetually echoed in other works with objects like fruit, moss, tile, and socks. These moments accumulate to form a collective memory, much like the sticky-slobbery build-up of chewed gum on the underside of Krishnamoorthy’s bathroom-tiled bench.

Andrews’ paintings likewise capture moments in real and imagined time – a swim lesson, a peek at hardened feet through the garden, a pile of persimmons. The colors and forms within her paintings echo those in Krishnamoorthy’s works, creating a dialogue that encourages the viewer to find connections, an aesthetic game of hide and seek.

11:30 playdate is documented in an accompanying publication featuring a curatorial essay by Megan DiNoia and reproduced images of additional works by Andrews and Krishnamoorthy.

February 14 - 18

When A Digital Surface Meets A Mutable Apparatus… is a two-person show featuring works by Daniel Mock and Dylan Riley, curated by Regina Harsanyi. This show aims to illustrate contemplations on both contemporary film theory and the utility of the readymade, focusing on six pieces, with iterations created specifically for this exhibition.

Seemingly in conversation with the writings of Giuliana Bruno, Riley’s work incorporates the scrim as an essential element to his software-based, randomized controlled projections. Riley creates a constant interplay between the tangible and digital realms, further demonstrated through his use of generated still images, made available to the visitor both through a conventionally bound artist book as well as scattered pages strewn across the gallery floor.

Mock plays with readymades in an intimate and transformative way, site-specifically reinventing their utility with each new context in mind. For example, in this exhibition, Pulpit (2017) interacts with Riley’s artist book by assuming the role of plinth or stand. Mock’s sculptures often meld with the distinct features of the spaces that temporarily houses them. Throughout this exhibition, whether attention is drawn to the texture of a screen, or the shift in utility of an otherwise mundane object, these “surfaces” are intended for careful consideration and cannot be overlooked.

February 21 - 25

Way Out / Away Out is an evolving and interactive show curated by Haley S. Pierce, featuring multi-media work by Anna Marchisello and Phoebe Louise Randall with contributions by Madeline McCormack, Torin Geller, and Justin Faircloth. Manipulated and embedded in process and surfacing in reaction, Marchisello and Randall play with the idea of nuanced chance to inform both audience and self. Using recycled material combined with original compositions, both explore the role of human experience through intentional spaces of ambiguity left open for interpretation.

Her process referred to as fugitive, Randall allows chance through previously altered material to dictate her work. Rooted in repetition, Randall has developed a language of symbols which appear serially in her paintings and spill over onto subsequent pieces, creating an ongoing dialogue that questions individual understanding of obscure form.

February 28 - March 4

In Systems Flow, works by Jóa and Kiyomi Taylor suggest that the often-oppositional binaries of the organic and the mechanical may be not only symbiotic, but interdependent. The artists’ invented spaces – man-made ecosystems and fantastical personal narratives – are as detached and independent as they are fundamentally intimate and alive.

Jóa’s fixtures and installations reimagine natural processes through interconnected glass prisms, in which painted designs and delicately arranged dioramas are thrown into flux by external forces, as electronic systems methodically alter their environmental conditions. Taylor’s paintings and stop-motion videos approach issues of identity and belonging; as inert, painted figures are animated both manually by affixed mobile limbs and mechanically through the interventions of a camera, they perform stories that ask whether it is our experiences or our emotions that linger as memories and selves.

Shared themes of circulation, evolution, and change – manifested in the pervasive flow of water – make these works not only about the experiment of living, but also about the inquisitiveness and innovation (whether from analytical study or raw feeling) needed to sustain and make sense of contemporary life. Literalizing this idea, the artists have collaborated on a handmade aquatic habitat, which houses a population of fish on the gallery floor.

March 7 – 11

Iiana Bilor-Wesly and Emily Wang

Terrace House is a meditation on rage. Rage is not necessarily loud or violent or obvious – it churns, brews, and sustains. There is a productivity born from rage, a motivating force necessary to exorcise the hum of anger, like the silent, slow leak of a balloon. Underpinning these works is a hostility not to be taken at face value. Considered together, Wang and Bilor-Wesly’s works reflect on the characterization of their experience as “other”, a taking up of space they have previously been denied. The works convey a frustration with outside attempts at politicization, when more accurately the works are political because they have to be. And yet, perhaps reaching a mutual understanding isn’t the point at all. Even so, the quietness and coded materiality of these works present a choice of engagement; the experience could be one of tranquility or confrontation. Bilor-Wesly and Wang take refuge in this instability.

Bilor-Wesly’s follows an instinctual, tangential working method, and the end result is a manifestation of distance, an objectification of the unattainable. Through their depiction, these objects, places, and individuals are brought into the artist’s space and made to feel the way she does. An identity accused of otherness is reversed into a kind of ownership, a wielding of power within the frame.

Wang’s use of oil and its discarded jugs, a full life cycle of the material, identifies oil as the lifeforce it is – oil as economy, as community, as sustenance, as the subject of conflict and war. In the bowls, the stillness of the oil resembles a wishing well, its smooth surface interrupted by the tremors of its surroundings.