Tal Gilboa + Elizabeth Stehl Kleberg “If This, Then That”

Soho20 Chelsea Gallery

This event has ended.

SOHO20 presents If This, Then That, a new installation by artists Tal Gilboa and Elizabeth Stehl Kleberg for the +/- Project Space, one of the open call winners. For this project, Gilboa and Kleberg continue to explore their two year long collaboration as an improvisational practice. Informed by sensibilities of collage and spatial association, their work is an enduring search for the logic binding our visual surroundings.

The main element in the installation is a new video work comprised of a string of cut-out video clips. Formally, this collage of masked images leaves the impression of a shifting arcade, illuminating in different pieces throughout the work’s duration. Like links in a chain, each image or snippet of video connects organically to the next in the sequence. Gilboa and Kleberg are primarily concerned with the syntax between these images, revealing a visual tension that both repels and attracts one another.

The videos themselves are abstracted pieces of the artists’ surroundings, invoking familiarity, but manipulated in a way that renders them unnameable. These fragments each embody a character in the arrangement of a non-linear, non-specific narrative. The artists begin their story at a debutante ball, focusing on the decadent gown featured in the ceremony. From there, they unwind a progression of concepts, images, and affectations to complete the cycle. The driving force in their work could be described as an alchemy of the ordinary – pushing objects, light, and images just past immediate recognition, outside of the confines of linguistic description.

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If This, Then That will be presented in conjunction with the artists’ online exhibition, Move Your Tongue Around Your Teeth and Imagine What It Does To Your Ankles at screen-space.info, also opening on Fri. November 18, 2016.