Elisa Soliven, Hands, 2019, Glazed ceramic and aluminum, Variable Dimensions
Dreamers
Curated by Paola Gallio at Ed. Varie
Featuring Jared Deery, Beka Goedde, Gretta Johnson, Jesus Polanco, Elisa Soliven, and Domenico Zindato
October 29 to November 29, 2020
“Life itself seems lunatic; who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams, this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash…too much sanity may be madness! And maddest of all…to see life as it is and not as it should be!” (Miguel Cervantes)
Assembly Room is pleased to present a new collaboration and exhibition with Ed. Varie curated by Paola Gallio.
Dreamers is a group exhibition of works on paper, paintings, sculptures, and ceramics exploring the mystical ritual of art-making driven by kaleidoscopic patterns, compulsiveness, and repetition. In psychology sciences, daydreaming is defined as a fantasy-prone personality compulsive disorder. The inclination to spend a lifelong, extensive and in-depth involvement in fantasy is considered a challenge that could lead to extreme psycho-pathologies. However, in a spiritual driven context, the rituality of gestures, the mystical trance of repeated action, the psychedelic connection to a metaphysical dimension is considered sacred: the Sama ceremonies for the Suni, meditative perpetual chanting prayers across religions, the sacred space created by meditation, trance induction, and repetition of the transient process of the Mandala creation. At this time of incredible pain and chaos, dreaming might very well be a centering space for the self and the soul.
Dreamers brings together artworks by Jared Deery, Beka Goedde, Gretta Johnson, Jesus Polanco, Elisa Soliven, and Domenico Zindato that is based on series and repetition, perpetual gesture and obsessive mark-making creating, figuration or abstraction, a configuration of symbols meant to reproduce wholeness.
Jared Deery’s paintings are characterized by a hermetic sense of repetition, with extroverted mystical actions and revelatory oneiric symbols. His work focuses on experimentation and transformation of motif, mood, color, and a mark-making process. The patterns used in his compositions melt into landscapes, fields, psychedelic composition, autobiographical storytelling, interconnecting nature like subjects into abstractions. Jared Deery lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Beka Goedde sculptures and printmaking explore duration, perception of change, and physical space movement by repeating signs and shapes with obsessive polychromatic patterns. Whether they are objects or works on paper, her process analyzes the friction of the juxtaposition of forces composing a detailed analysis of a possible space’s alterations. The transparency of the layers of color on paper, and the cluster of metal emerging from the wall, channel into the world the composition of the matter that composes it, guiding the viewer through tangible to immaterial paths. Beka Goedde lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Gretta Johnson works on paper and paintings delve into the surreal relation between micro and macro landscapes element breaking the structure of visual hierarchy. The recurring subject of a shape of an “X” melts on her canvases, shifting its geometrical structural form into an organic floral-like shape. The biomorphic recurring motifs occasionally define the artwork outline format itself, creating a metaphysical subject-object relationship. The organotrophic elements portrayed by Johnson’s are impartial, and as the Dreams, are spontaneous assimilation of unconscious contents into consciousness. Gretta Johnson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Jesus Polanco’s drawings portrait his connection with life through his relationship with nature. His drawings’ repetitive mark-making is the ritual that keeps him grounded in life during his years of homelessness. Polanco traveled with art supplies and paper from shelter to shelter. Through abstraction, symbols, secret codes, Polanco secures existence in the conventional world. His drawings are currently stored in Austin, Texas, in a facility helping to reintegrate homeless people into society. Jesus Polanco is a Mexican born artist, and currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.
Elisa Soliven’s ceramics serve as a record of her inquiry to capture the essence of subjects, figurative and abstract, and preserve a frozen history of gestural mark-making. She symbolically transfigures the subject through an archaeological accumulation of modeled clay and embedded ceramic layers, exploring the possibilities of pattern/abstraction coexistence. Soliven is drawn to clay for the immediacy with which it conveys the working process, and for how it captures a sense of the talismanic in the ordinary through ritual and repetition. Elisa Soliven lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Domenico Zindato’s labor-intensive, meticulously detailed drawing technique mixes geometric shapes and volumes dissolved in space driven by obsessive repetition, referencing prehistoric cave paintings, aboriginal art, and Native-American decorative kaleidoscopic patterns. The transient nature of the surface of Zindato’s drawings on leaves resembles the evanescence ritual of Buddhist mandalas revealing the relativity of space and time in social and spiritual dimensions. Domenico Zindato is an Italian born artist living and working in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Initially programmed to open at Assembly Room’s former space in the lower east side, the show was put on standby, then canceled due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our gratitude to Karen Schaupeter, a phenomenal woman, artist, curator, and the founder of Ed. Varie, who offered her support and invited this collaboration after the close of our Henry Street space.
Dreamers is Assembly Room’s first physical exhibition since April 2020 and represents our new nomadic identity.