Brett Seiler, Why Maurice (…), 2018, Paint on canvas, dimensions variable
Multiplicities Vol. 1 Continuous Unknowing
Curated by Natasha Becker
Featuring Blake Daniels, Helina Metaferia, and Brett Seiler
October 19 – November 25, 2018
Assembly Room is delighted to present Multiplicities: Continuous Unknowing, curated by Natasha Becker and dedicated to the discovery of new and surprising creative assemblages. Like a sand dune, multiplicity in constant flux, though it attains some consistency for a short or long time, it has permeable boundaries, and it is defined provisionally. It is a repeated call to imagine anew. Like a scattered group of islands, Multiplicities connects three distinct and dynamic young artists: Blake Daniels, Helina Metaferia, and Brett Seiler.
Working closely with the material of paint, Blake Daniels reveals and codes desires, personal stories and social politics into images of unaccounted histories. This creates layered narratives and stories that better depict the reality the artist experienced as a queer and gay child. These often highly personal experiences take form through a process of cutting, hiding and revealing, bringing visibility to suppressed desires while revealing their existence within histories in which sexuality, in its many forms and manifestations, can flourish. His paintings become tales, haunted stories of a place where bodies, intimacy, and time blend into a living queer history equally as visible as un-seen.
Helina Metaferia’s creative inquiry is devoted to reasserting the black body in sites of systemic oppression — including institutional spaces, art history, gentrified communities, or land marked by historic trauma. “I am constantly reflecting on the notions of “home” and how our racial and gendered body complicates this,” says Metaferia, whose work engages viewers in conversations about time, space, and belonging. Through an interdisciplinary practice of performance, video, installation, photography, objects, and mark-making, she presents the complexity, transformation, and rebellion that come with migrations, gentrification, and trauma.
The work of conceptual artist Brett Seiler reveals details of his life while engaging viewers through expressions of emotions that are universal. Merging the personal and the political with the material, Seiler weaves words, images, objects into his installations in a way that feels almost diaristic. Unflinchingly honest, his installations create spaces, temporary spaces, queering spaces and is inspired by flowers, friends, poetry, humor, memories, migration, nostalgia, turbulence, the Kimberly Hotel, philosophy, and the lovers he meets along the way.
It gives us great pleasure to debut of an exciting group of international young artists.
Natasha Becker is an independent curator and one of the co-founders of Assembly Room.
