NYAB Event - “Repeat Pressure Until” Exhibition

“Repeat Pressure Until” Exhibition

Ortega y Gasset Projects @ The Old American Can Factory

This event has ended.

Ortega y Gasset Projects presents Repeat Pressure Until, a material investigation into the spaces between the recognizable and the unknown. Artists in the show use inhabitation and over-inhabitation of both material and societal norms to transform perception and offer new proposals. We cannot avoid the material, social, and cultural worlds we live in. Utilizing understood reference points becomes radical because it implies that all knowns have the potential to be made strange. There is a space opened up when testing limits of ideas or materials. Insistence both strengthens through emphasis and falls apart through over-repetition. The gendered female body is presented as benignly understandable and simultaneously profane. The object is holding or is held. Dominant can be overthrown. (Although unnerving, it is made palatable because it is beautiful and the chaos is momentary.)

Artists in the show suggest ways for us to live inside the known world, while subverting these knowns through the act of placing pressure. This exertion of energy can create new forms and functions out of recognizable tropes and materials. Artists use photography, painting, drawing, video, and sculpture as tactics towards newly imagined versions of that which we know. They shoot arrows of violence, obsession, re-imagined sexuality, kinship, and motherhood into anything in the world around us to which the arrow can cling. There is an ambivalence in understanding that we are our material form(s), gender(s) and role(s), and a courage in using exactly those to imagine other.

It all begins with a geological re-formulation suggested in the work of Harnischfeger; elements of color, paper, clay, and remnants from the natural world fuse into a newly stratified past. Fisher and Salas use sculptural forms to forge new ways of taking up space through material presence and pressure. Hill provides a historical foremother to the idea of using the available materials to render them newly and fiercely poetic. Cartwright, Davey, Hoey, Iliatova, Leventhal, Waldron, Winant use photography, painting, drawing, and video to create tension between ideas of gendered and expected roles, with twists and reconfigurations of such ideals. There is an uncomfortable yet seductive force at play. We are witnessing the prying open of the lid of our recognizable world; the mirage is made material. Here is a new proposal.

In conjunction with this show, the publication Mother Mother will be released, with contributions from over fifteen artist and writer mothers. This publication makes visible the act of being a mother, articulating conflicts and confusion in being mother, artist, lover, partner, sister, friend, and more.

Curated by Sheilah Wilson

Catherine Cartwright, Moyra Davey, Stacy Fisher, Hilary Harnischfeger, Dana Hoey, Pati Hill, Vera Iliatova, Dani Leventhal, Carolyn Salas, Kim Waldron, Carmen Winant

Media

• Installation

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