Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to invite you to the second iteration of Klammern aus denen Blätter Spriessen, an exhibition with works by Colleen Hargaden, Filip Kostic, Yein Lee, Andrew Rutherdale and Jonas Schoeneberg. The exhibition is a collaboration between HSFA and Berlin-based independent space Scherben, who hosted the first iteration in April 2022.

Klammern aus denen Blätter Spriessen assembles a group of artists who have independently sought to investigate different strains and subcultures of escapism, found in DIY maker movements, mysticism, gaming culture, biotechnology, virtual reality and the extension of bodily formations through social and scientific techniques. Showing in this ensemble for the first time, Colleen Hargaden, Filip Kostic, Yein Lee, Andrew Rutherdale and Jonas Schoeneberg venture out of their studios in Berlin, Los Angeles, Montreal and Vienna to open up their practices to mutual encounters, allowing their perspectives and interests to intersect, converge and enter into conversation with one another. Together they offer conceptual variables to understand situations excluded from normative notions of the real. Like the seemingly irreal scenario of “brackets, from which leaves sprout” (Klammern aus denen Blätter Spriessen), alternate patterns and cognitive abilities emerge from which to think anew the escape button commonly associated with configurations of virtual reality. If one of these pathways was projected in spacetime, it would read: “Once you’ve made a gateway of brackets, slipping into the embrace between them, you unlock the control console and peer into its memory slot. There. Expect a beautiful but unreal setting.”
The exhibition is kindly supported by the Checkpoint Charlie Foundation and the Austrian Consulate General.

Exhibition Text by Steph Holl-Trieu
Review (The Brooklyn Rail)

A collaborative project by two Los Angeles-based artists, this exhibition shows the artifacts of a set of characters traveling through a multitude of spaces. Some of these spaces are real, some fictitious, some contemporary, and some from long ago; they have all enabled these multidimensional explorers to draw on, distort, cite, and warp the different ideas and themes that have come to them. 

The alchemical product of manipulating the experienced logic is a travelogue; an absurd yet serious documentation. 

Exhibition text by Vanalyne Green

Brian Tarpey and Tyler Morrison write that their work pertains “to the pitfalls of collaboration as an enterprise.”  They are true to their words, creating art works that respond to a remit of collaboration as, “a series of specific issues … taken and placed into a cerebral bingo caller”.   This is a bingo game you want to play.  There are so many artefacts of their explorations — video, sculpture, and paintings, for example — and so many ways to enter their show, that I felt as if I were following breadcrumbs laid out for an audience, but with breaks between episodes — taking meaning as one can or chooses to, relaxing into a folly of collaboration with no fixed abode, point of view, or narrative closure.  The work is generous, brave, and legion.

Among the clues dotting the path through the Tarpey/Morrison universe are friars in floppy outfits with no attention paid to fit, in which they trudge through tunnels, cow muck, and fake Stonehenge columns.  There is nothing heroic in their actions, other than, perhaps, performing as actors in fetid underground tunnels.  This isn’t the myth of the hero; this is the myth of a reluctant Bartleby the Scrivener who prefers not to but does.   The players scrawl cows’ images in candlelit tunnels, have the obligatory face-off with a Minotaur, and perform their assigned rounds in a dairy farm, acting as a human indexical project that ticks the boxes of ancient myths with the gusto of two men waiting for their prescriptions of anti-depressants to be filled.   They chart their path in collaborative exploration caring not for the machismo hullabaloo of phallic pride, whether of an ancient Cretan or a suited-and-booted business executive.

Their paintings tell a different story.  Whether they are scrawled (the cows) or meticulously constructed, another form of negotiation is at work, one that weds Morrison’s commitment to paint qua paint with Tarpey’s background in sculpture and performative pieces.  In “Berlin, Vermont” and “In Search of Lost Corn”, paint as background and treated aluminium as foreground insist that the eye can’t rest on one plane, though there are densities that act as proposed punctums:  the black-and-white tondo in the middle of the barn, say, or the peach/pastel necco-wafer colour of a square in “In Search of Lost Corn”.  The works hover between figuration and abstraction, driven by a palette that either deploys complementary colours (“Barn”) in one instance, or evokes in “Lost Corn” a hallucinatory corn maze mapped out in blues, dark browns, and hay-bale yellows.  The colours radiate in various directions, but there is a compositional true north that makes it impossible to get lost. 

As in the corpus of each artist’s work, Morrison and Tarpey deploy multiple iterations of their given themes.  Some of the iterative gestures in the current exhibition take the form of sculpture, such as a three-dimensional bull’s head.  Another embodies the market and a banal heroic, which is to say, coins of the artists’ profiles as a sort of NFT, referencing the entirely un-banal history of accounting as it was proposed in the early Renaissance by Luca Pacioli.  This matters because of the ethos of that time, which encompassed discoveries in mathematics and compositional space (Pierro della Francesca and Leonardo Da Vinci), for which each was a requirement for the other.   That mapping between areas of research is as much the subject of the Tarpey/Morrison exhibit as anything else. 

In the video, “The Golden Calf and the Brazen Bull” two people traverse the Los Angeles River and enter tunnels only to exit through Vermont’s stone chambers, resonant with the unsolved mysteries of their origins.  Without the magic of CGI, we watch the two actors transit through space and time like silent movie characters, then walk later onto a vast desert, quoting along the way sacrifice, torture, heroic achievement, mysteries, quests, faith, ecology, and the banalities of pop culture.   Although this is video, and the objects that accompany it form a travelogue, as Tarpey and Morrison define it, they are also a love letter and homage to the space between people and things.  To quote E.M. Forster, “Only connect!”  It does — and we do.

June 10 – July 10 2022

Bailey Connolly & Isabelle Frances McGuire is the second exhibition by the two artists in as many years, following their debut Dresses Without Women, at Mickey, Chicago in 2021.

For this exhibition McGuire’s breathing, blinking, grinning historical cosplay sex automotons have been reduced to a small metal enclosure connected to an amplifier. Inside the enclosure, two filtered oscillators produce sine waves, utilized for their relation to the human voice, that reverberate at a constant throughout the space. Two heart shaped sockets frame LEDs that blink in patterns which correspond to data-sets visualizing the heart beats of McGuire and Connolly, evidenced by the letters “b” and “i” in the title. Here, in lieu of the automaton’s life-size cosmetic likeness, the body’s kinetic physical properties have been severed to reveal their essential components. The speaking voice and beating heart become surrogate equivalents of the oscillator, knob, and light emitting diode. Accompanying the synthesizer are two images that function as a kind of memento mori for the transformations described above. The framed still life photographs with black mat document the lifeless 3D printed skulls of the absent life-size automatons before the application of silicone, hair, pigment, and animation- a moment of the life or death cycle only possible in the non-living-living entities of our present robotics age.

Two large painted foam sculptures titled ex (crush) and b (crush) occupy the floor of the gallery. Connolly’s forms are resonant of cattle crush apparatuses that are used to hold animals in place while being examined to minimize the risk of injury to both the animal and its operator. Cattle crush technology was famously appropriated for use by people with autism spectrum disorders who find relief in the physical sensation of being hugged without any direct human contact. Like the initials in McGuire’s heart beat visualizer, the titles of these works suggest multiple readings beyond reference to the individual forms themselves. It is not hard to imagine Connolly’s allusion to the self and others behind the variables “b” or “ex” and also, given the fate of the cattle being held on their way to extermination, their absence. The decision to retitle and repaint ex (crush) for this exhibition is also telling. Produced at a smaller scale relative to the size of the animal itself and not the referent machine, these works ask to be considered as both subject and object. Like Connolly’s sculptures of modernist housing reduced to the bare minimum parameters for ethical lab mice habitation, the shift in scale recalls the skeleton of the animal subject. The architecture of the apparatus has seemingly come to replace the object of the machine’s intended function.

KW

Wrinkles on a white lab coat fold into themselves,
cover blind spots the naked eye often neglects and hug one another tightly. They briefly brush against each other and rush along about their day, scratching the surface of their neighboring menace, touching each other’s fingertips. Carefully, meticulously placed they frame a beautiful calligraphy
that’s stitched onto someone’s right chest pocket.

Brackets are symbols that wrap around words, phrases or sentences in a piece of writing. They mark what should be considered a separate organ to the main body of text. Most machinic screen readers will gloss over them, meaning a. they will just leave the brackets including their contents out, or b. they will read the contents without hinting to the existence of the brackets, all that (in text) is hugged in by the brackets then swims (in speech) in the same soup as the remaining text.

It’s not just machines though, because a human translator from text to speech encounters the same issue. [To open and close brackets, or not to open or close brackets? (In speech, that is.)]

No beauty for the profane. In mathematical operations, brackets determine the order of those operations, meaning brackets are algorithmic devices. When brackets are nested, the rule is that you must work from the inside out. Some birds work differently, often dropping stuff into a chosen tree, relying on spider silk and saliva to make it stick. As we know, trees grow leaves, but so do brackets. At least that is one possible scenario in the not-so-distant future.

Hence, brackets do (sprout, grow, shape) matter. Imagine for a second the Bed (PC), or the (Bed) PC, or (automatic) drawing vs. automatic (drawing), or synthetic (organism) in relation to (synthetic) organism. Though you can’t really continue this exercise indefinitely, because madness will overtake meaning, which is a good sensation in general, but only in moderation.

Consider these brackets, the green foliage of a plant yet to be discovered:

(Oh the joy of working on a warm body)

52.511343580883555, 13.395318379788897: {a viral medium that undergoes mutation and reproduces itself like a symbiotic culture of…}

{a painting reaches for the handle of a window, opens itself into its surrounding, oh! it spilled a living organism all over the ground, hope no one minds}

34.04929626162093, -118.35784986105523: [leave society, leave all of it behind, the need to not sleep where you eat or not to eat where you fuck or not to play where you build a castle in the sky that is on the ground that is on a mattress that is in your own grind, just switch the way you think about it]

 <Like brackets, a capsule encloses something. It preserves something in a stable environment by cutting it off from another. It remains to be seen whom or what this tendency serves. Escape fear, escape hope!>

Once you’ve made a gateway of brackets, slipping into the embrace between them, you unlock the control console and peer into its memory slot. There. Expect a beautiful but unreal setting.

(Tbc.)

Hold Me TV is a 4 day screening program featuring films and videos by 10 artists who work in a variety of ways with the embodied camera. In these works, the camera is an integral (body) part of the worlds the artists build – humorous, sensorial, uncanny, fleshy, kinetic, intimate, public, high stakes.

This screening series is a collective curatorial effort by writer and curator June Drevet, visual artist Sunny Pfalzer, and choreographer and artist Melanie Jame Wolf. They invite visitors to watch films together while thinking about the agency and possibility of bodies in the different formal systems of choreography, cinema, and visual art. And to question what alternate regimes of looking can be produced when those distinct formal systems intersect.

The artists featured in the program are Jamie Crewe, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT), Malina Heinemann & Joseph Kadow, Barbara Kapusta, Sunny Pfalzer, Lynne Sachs, Stefanie Schwarzwimmer, SERAFINE1369, Anna Spanlang, and Melanie Jame Wolf. The Display is developed by Luna Ghisetti.

Preview on Sunday Open 13.03.22

Opening: 17.03.22, 5pm

Exhibition: 17.03. – 20.03.22, 5 – 10pm

patients, fillers.

a game of symbio-parasitical metamorphosis.

the body as hole.

look behind. the syringe in your medulla.

invert yourself. turn the cannons.
Exit !1radicalism.

the holed body.

‘ The vacuum remains: you stand in midcourse, shocked by the discovery, and those of you

who yearn desperately for the sweet unawareness of the cultural house of bondage

cry out to return there, to the sources, but you cannot go back, your retreat is cut off,

the bridges burned, so you must go forward ‘ Golem XIV

Largo by Aline Sofie Rainer (exhibition text)

“The problem of mitosis is located in the tendency of the identical.

Divided is the split.

An explosion that occurs in humanity dissected down to the minute-to-minute or second-by-second, is in some sense a distillation of different urges and passions.

„

Manifesting One’s Future by Samantha Bohatsch (exhibition text)

At Scherben, Eulitz has collected design objects of discrete historical origins and interwoven their contexts into a shared narrative. In this process, what is imperceptible of these object-histories is illuminated, having otherwise been unseen, misunderstood, or buried. Contained within their design and consumption are political ramifications of production, hidden in plain sight. Some of them (the VEB Halle pendant lights) are perhaps more glamorous than others (the United Buddy Bears and Ikea’s Billy bookshelves). Having transposed the exhibition’s milieu, social tensions come to the fore, reminding us that if we want to make sense of our world, overcoming our longing for Gemütlichkeit, or hominess, is perhaps a necessary step.

Unbearable Lightness by Lian Rangkuty (exhibition text)
Review (kubaparis)

Your horizon has limits even holes.

You can close your eyes.
Trans Columns.
The past will catch you up if you run faster.
Portrait of Luce Irigaray.
My shop is the face I front.
We walk the same line.

A layer of fog occasionally spreads over the floor of the exhibition space at Scherben. It floats gently through the rods of Michaela Meises Trans Columns, rises slowly into the heights of the room, and interposes a soft blur before the watercolors in Markues’s series For the Men & the Others. An atmosphere somewhere between fantasy film, night club, and calculated effect results, which unites the works while also making the distance between them and the viewer tangible. A similar ambiguity characterizes the Trans Columns themselves. Developed in 2009 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the sculptures transform the column, typically a symbol of stability in patriarchal society, into something mobile. Without a roof to support, they become permeable.

In their attempts to undermine the certainty and stability of meaning in patriarchal society in favor of the fluid and mercurial, both Markues and Michaela Meise have looked to the writing of feminist psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray. The title of the exhibition, as well as one of Markues’s watercolors, Your Horizon Has Limits Even Holes, is a quotation from Irigaray’s work. Through her attention to bodily experience and engendered perception, she acknowledges the particularity of each individual without forgetting our shared connections.

Irigaray’s approach to language is mirrored in Markues’s watercolor series For the Men & the Others, in production since 2014. In each watercolor, the text is usually a quotation whose liquid script cannot be spoken, but is nevertheless open to examination. Painted in a gestural but antisubjective and deskilled fashion, the watercolors challenge the construction of subjectivity through both form and content. Because language comes from the other, it is not the subject who speaks; the subject is spoken. Alongside Markues’s watercolors hangs a ceramic relief portrait of Luce Irigaray made by Michaela Meise.

It depicts the philosopher reading a book — as she did while modeling for the portrait. On the 21st of November, there will be several readings in the exhibition space. During the readings, three sculptures by Michaela Meise will be installed for use as seating: Cheshire Cat and two Cheshire Kittens (all 2013). The exhibition is also accompanied by a commissioned text by Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju titled “The Lawn,” a poetic collage rethinking the concept of intuition.

THE LAWN by Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju (exhibition text)
Mit taxonomischer Beflissenheit (taz 23.11.2021)