Curatorial Collaborative

February 7 – 11, 2017

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, 2017

When a Digital Surface Meets a Mutable Apparatus… 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. 

When A Digital Surface Meets A Mutable Apparatus… is documented in an accompanying publication featuring a curatorial essay by Regina Harsanyi and reproduced images of additional works by Mock and Riley.

February 28 – March 4, 2017

In Systems Flow, curated by Julia Bozer, artists Jóhanna Asgeirsdottir and Kiyomi Taylor reveal how the simplistic binaries of the organic and the synthetic are not only symbiotic, but interdependent. The artists’ imagined spaces – artificial ecosystems and complex personal narratives, respectively – are as detached and independent as they are fundamentally intimate and alive. 

Asgeirsdottir’s fixtures and installations include networks of glass prisms connected through the passage of water, which alters the sensitive contents of each cell – its colors and compositions – as temperatures wax and wane. Taylor uses images of herself and her family to approach issues of identity and belonging. Together with her paintings, derived from and collaged with family photographs, Taylor’s video asks whether our experiences or their documentation survive as memory and how we can piece ourselves together from fragmentary sources, sentiments, and roots.

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.

February 21 – 25, 2017

The concept of chance is a slippery subject, pervading modernist thought through its pronounced lack of artistic agency and incalculable conclusions. It can also become nuanced, manipulated and embedded in process and surfacing in reaction. *Way Out / Away Out* plays with these ideas of chance, cycling through their work to enlighten both audience and self. Using recycled material and ideas, both artists explore the role of human experience through intentional spaces of uncertainty and ambiguity. 

Additional contributions to this exhibition were made by Madeline McCormack, Torin Geller, and Justin Faircloth.

March 7 – 11, 2017

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.

Terrace House is documented in an accompanying publication featuring a curatorial essay by Eva Jensen and reproduced images of additional works by Wang and Bilor-Wesly.