“SIGNALS," on view at SOMEDAY Gallery NYC from June 25 - July 29, 2022.
Ivana Bašić, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Olivia Erlanger, Brittni Ann Harvey, Madeline Hollander, Umico Niwa, Rachel Rossin, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, Pauline Shaw, Catherine Telford-Keogh, Alison Veit, Isabel Yellin
Curated by: Jeanette Bisschops, Anaïs Castro, Isabel Yellin
There have been many turning points in humanity’s relationship with nature, most often informed by perceptions of the celestial, a good reminder that the forces that shape humanity far precede modern people and will persist long after we’re gone. The collision between nature and technology often conjures sci-fi narratives in which nonhuman forms of intelligence make contact and threaten current paradigms of existence.
Within art history, there is a longstanding tradition of exploring these existential crises using the alien and the uncanny to suggest aspects of human existence that are intangible, yet central to our lived experience. Today, artists are recontextualizing and revitalizing this conversation. They contemplate the alienation of contemporary (post) human experience in an age of accelerating technology and global warming by simultaneously turning their gaze outward and inward. While they have each developed an idiosyncratic visual language and aesthetic strategy, this group of artists have all elected the fantastical realm to articulate the trials and tribulations of the psyche and to engage with a material exploration of the body. Their works testify collectively to the obsolescence of binary distinctions between animal and human, between man and woman, between nature and culture.
Challenging the tyranny of patriarchal anthropocentrism, the artists brought together in SIGNALS are interested in movements towards hybridization. Their work often mixes organic materials and shapes with industrial and geometric forms. The entanglement of organic and synthetic becomes a game in which objects take turns in spurring repulsion and fascination. And while the history of interspecies interaction is one of discomfort and even fear, this is a project that urges a reconsideration of our Promethean dispositions in order to recognize the interconnectedness of all things, living and inert.
