You ought to lie in rivers or in ponds
As do the waterweeds which harbour pike.
The body grows light in the water. When your arm
Falls easily from water into sky
The little wind rocks it absentmindedly
[From “Of Swimming in Lakes and Rivers,” by Bertolt Brecht]
An eddy is a spiral, a small vortex, which spins counter to and disrupts the current. Against the great tides of the ocean, or the modest flow of a stream, eddies catch and confuse, addle and amaze. To Bertolt Brecht floating inverts our relationship to the real: we transcend gravity, we “fall into the sky.” Here we see works which similarly push against the currents of our material world, and in doing so call on us to suspend disbelief: in repurposing and recontextualizing media and materials from industrial, domestic, and nonhuman spaces the five artists represented here articulate the fragmented, yet poetic, nature of the present moment.
To those caught in the slipstream of material culture, these works are eddies in the face of capitalism’s incessant flows. Clare Koury’s works repurpose inconspicuous industrial fixtures, forcing a renegotiation of the body’s relationship to the hardware which characterizes banal interiors. Quay Quinn Wolf evokes an encounter with the domestic, but on closer look discomforts: his assemblage recontextualizes a hospital bed’s steel railing into a discursive grid, rendered banal—but not passive—on the gallery floor. In a beguilingly diaphanous sculpture, Daniel Klaas Beckwith probes the uncanny: his silk spider web directly questions our desire to look closely, to engage with the mundane. Vladislav Markov’s velour panels, a triptych and a pair of draped fabrics, harken to archaic textiles while bearing the mark of a futuristic symbolism. Tenant of Culture frames an abstracted quilt, stitched from fragments of handbags and discarded garments, yet retains traces of their origins—literally keeping the tags on, and in plain view.
– Holly Bushman
