Learning to read from lips and stones

Vernon Byron, Shuyi Cao, Julián Chams, David Gilbert, Lauren Anaïs Hussey, Dana Levy, Yo-Yo Lin and Yidan Zeng, Matt Logsdon, Bradley Marshall, Alex McTigue, Julia Rooney

August 5 - September 9, 2023

Press:

Artefuse, Jenny Wang.

It’s an exhibition of emergence at different speeds. Freud used the figure of Anadyomene to describe the way the unconscious moves–something coming to the surface of the water. Rimbaud’s Anadyomene was stranger– a corpse described as a landscape; more strata than bone. It’s almost like something begins to mirror and reflect its surroundings as it reaches the surface–a diver’s bends of adjacency and accumulation.

Deleuze might say that irroring is a virtual experience, akin to the images of memory. Proust defined memory as virtual, as “real but not actual, ideal but not abstract.” This virtual material is a language of mimetoliths and Messianic toast; of Jon Lovitz’ voice coming out of an animated radio that brings levity to commodities being phased out and forgotten. (Remember how horrible the junkyard was?) Material is meaning, and objects form the apse to the moments and desires between us. These are the things we pass back and forth while we talk, that we see ourselves in, that sing in entangled symphonics back to us.

How can we access what is just below the surface, this virtual experience in material? That is where the strange Eleuthera of karst resides, peeled back by waves; a loop within each material that exposes its uncertainty. Process and weird subjectivity are the passwords spoken to open up copper, concrete, steel, and glass to slow it to absolute zero–to make it drag, to make it form a coil within itself, in hopes of making the material do something unintended. It is also a frozen inbetween, a collision, the way a car wrapped around a pole traps space within itself–closes its own loop between two worlds–an endlessly mirrored unfolding. Something unexpected gets trapped in the narrowing passage of the alembic. Not everything in this space is anthropomorphic, but it can be. Not everything is a history of a material, a tracing of its dream, but it's a material that digs in and desires things outside of human wants–autotelic and expressive and wanting.

Duchamp understood this forever ago. When Breton asked him to design an exhibition for the Surrealists, he chose to place the work in the dark and give everyone flashlights. Later, when asked to restage it, he connected everything by string. He understood that this is and always has been about a languaging through material. It’s a material trapeze connecting us, and the answers that are formed when we bump into each other in the dark, listening for the dreams of rocks.

Vernon M. Byron is a visual artist based in New York's Hudson Valley. Vernon earned a BFA with a concentration in printmaking from SUNY New Paltz in 2011, since then he has continued to show work at a variety of locations in the Mid-Hudson Valley. 

Vernon investigates how socio-economic structures inform our perception of reality. Vernon utilizes a combination of installation, sculpture, and digital printmaking. Through the construction of objects and installations, Vernon imparts physical presence upon critical political, economic, and social issues that affect BIPOC communities and the working class. By immersing the viewer in the experiences of oppressed people, they are presented with the opportunity to critically observe these systems, and begin to address their sources. 

Shuyi Cao is a New York-based artist whose practice explores alchemical approaches to object making and knowledge osmosis. Through archeological speculation and ecological fiction, she contemplates the porous plurality of relations between sciences, technocultures, mythologies, and cosmologies. Her multi-medium sculptures and installation synthesizes various organic and inorganic materials, natural and artificial processes. Combining hand-crafted and digital artifacts, moving images, and sounds, the assemblage suggests heterogeneous material and technological temporalities. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Today Art Museum, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Long March Space, Para Site Hongkong, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Contemporary Gallery Kunming, Chronus Art Center (CAC), Banff Centre for the Arts, UrbanGlass, Chambers Fine Art, Shin Gallery, Fou Gallery, A.I.R. 13th Biennale, among others. 

Julián Chams’ work addresses the aftermath, ruins and emptiness that persist after an ending. The pieces act as fossilized remnants of something that has ceased to exist. After the dissolution of a relationship, the end of a voyage, the conclusion of a catastrophic war or natural disaster, all that remain are traces. The works provide glimpses of another time or reality. Worldly elements are reconfigured in a way that is simultaneously familiar and surreal, evoking the sense of a vision. 

Born in Colombia and based in Brooklyn, Julián Chams works within multiple mediums including painting and sculpture. Throughout his work his work there is a special interest in time, nature, and the connection humanity has with both. His work has been shown individually and in group exhibitions at Wave Hill, the Ace Hotel with Homework Gallery, and AC Institute in New York; the XVI and XV Salon Regional de Artistas Caribe in Colombia; the Center for Visual Art at MSU Denver, CO; and La Esquina and 50/50 in Kansas City, MO, among others. He has participated in residencies at BRIC and Wave Hill in New York. 

David Gilbert (b. 1953) is a painter based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He explores the malleability of memory and perception through remembered, manufactured, and imagined landscapes. His work addresses the innately human ability to refine, aestheticize, and idealize the everyday, though subjective recollection of fleeting experience. 

Lauren Anaïs Hussey is a Brooklyn based artist whose work considers the thresholds of intelligibility in abstraction as a formal language. She attended the University of North Florida for her BFA and holds an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has been included in shows at Nexx Asia, Subtitled NYC, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Johnny Utah Projects, SHAG, Marvin Gardens, Carol Corey Fine Art, Conduit Gallery. Hussey is a Co-director of Underdonk gallery in Brooklyn. 

Dana Levy was born in Tel Aviv and Lives and works in New York. She was the 2019/2020 Freund Teaching Fellow at the Sam Fox School of Art in Washington University, St. Louis. She was the 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Digital/Electronic Arts from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her solo exhibition Currents 119: Dana Levy at the Saint Louis Art Museum opened in 2021, other solo exhibitions include at Fridman Gallery NYC (2019), The Israel Museum Jerusalem (2015), Petach Tikva Museum of Art (2014), Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv (2012), Nicelle Beauchene Gallery NYC (2010), and more. She was part of of the 2022 Berlin Biennale, with newly commissioned work and has participated in group shows and screenings including at Videonale at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, C24 gallery NYC, Screen City Biennale Stavanger, Kadist Gallery San Francisco, Johannes Vogt Gallery NYC, Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena , Wexner Center of Art , The Bass Museum, Tribeca Film Festival, The Tel Aviv Museum, Harn Museum of Art , Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland , Tate London and more. Residencies include AIRIE Everglades National Park, Wave Hill Workspace, LMCC Workspace, Art Omi, I-Park, and Triangle Arts Association NY, Ok Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria, and Museumsquartier, Vienna. 

Yo-Yo Lin 林友友 is a Taiwanese-American, interdisciplinary artist who uses animation, performance, and sound to create meditative ‘memoryscapes.’ Her recent body of work reveals and re-values the complex realities of living with invisibilized chronic illness, investigating ideologies of healing, resilience, and care. Her practice often facilitates sites for community-centered abundance, developing into physical and virtual installations, workshops, accessible nightlife parties, and artist collectives. In 2022 she debuted her multimedia performance “channels” at The Shed to a sold-out house. She has shown at The Shed, has taught at NYU ITP, and was recently selected for the 2022 Disability Futures Fellowship and 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for technology-centered arts. Yo-Yo currently resides in Taipei, Taiwan. 

Yidan Zeng 曽一丹 is a queer, Chinese American artist stitching together text, textiles, performance, and food towards an embodied practice of attention and care. Her works are continually woven webs with no center, seeking only to make tangible the invisible threads in our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the natural world. Raised by Memphis, TN and Guangzhou, China, she can currently be found wandering/wondering through the streets of Philadelphia. 

Matt Logsdon was born in Columbus, OH in 1982. He earned a B.A. in Fine Art from The Ohio State University in 2005. From 2007-2011 he conducted a community art project entitled The Bus Project. In 2015 he earned an M.F.A. in Combined Media from Hunter College. In 2022, Logsdon founded the artist-run gallery Field of Play and curated its first two exhibitions. Field of Play has been profiled in Hyperallergic and Cultured Magazine. Logsdon’s work has been recently shown at Tappeto Volante Gallery in Brooklyn and the Mansfield Art Center in Ohio. Logsdon lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 

Bradley Marshall is a sculptor based in Brooklyn, NY. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and received his MFA from East Tennessee State University. 

Alex Mctigue received his MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and a BFA in Photography from SVA. In 2017 he was a participant of the SOMA summer residency program in Mexico City. Recent residencies include the riso print residency program at Penumbra Foundation, and was a visual arts resident at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY through early 2023. He teaches in the photography department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. 

Julia Rooney makes paintings, installations and community-based projects that invite viewers to reflect on how 21st-century technologies—from apps like Instagram, to platforms like Zoom—condition how and what we see. Her work straddles physical and digital mediums: existing both as artworks made in real space, while also as digital renderings of these artworks, shot by cameras, computers, and phones. Her recent solo shows, Album (Freight+Volume, 2023), Screen Shot (Jennifer Terzian Gallery, 2022) and @SomeHighTide (Arts+Leisure, 2021) featured radically-scaled paintings—some the size of phone-screens—mimicking the way online space juxtaposes the micro with the macro, distorting our sense of scale and perspective. In 2022, she was an Artist-in-Residence at The Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans, LA), and in 2021-22 was an Artist-in-Residence at The Yale University Art Gallery and Artspace New Haven. Previous grants and residencies include The Rema Hort Mann Foundation's Artist Community Engagement Grant (2022), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s “SU-CASA” Residency (2019), and More Art’s “Engaging Artist Grant” (2015). Rooney received her BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale School of Art.