Borden Capalion “Swamp Etiquette”

Lyles & King

This event has ended.

Lyles & King presents Swamp Etiquette, a solo exhibition of new work by Borden Capalino.

Capalino prints found 35mm film, stock photos, and cell phone pics onto painted polystyrene mounted on board. Some images qualify as what Hito Steryl has dubbed the “poor image,” a digital picture of low resolution and dubious provenance - cut, pasted, and severed from its history. Others, the stock photos, are pristine, enlargeable, and for sale, but similarly deracinated and eager to fulfill the viewer’s expectations and projections. The piles of blond hair, the face of a smiling policeman, a cornocupia of rotting fruit, invite associations and projections.

Capalino then slices and intermixes the images, defaces them with poured acetone (which melts the polystyrene), and coats them in swathes of glistening silicone resin. Each move of material damage he counters with aesthetic seduction. The surfaces become topographies of craters, pools of silicone, and mounds of earth. The transformation of the photographic images into primordial landscape is further emphasized by the application of cow hooves, sea shells, soil, freeze dried shell fish, rice, and insertion of wall vents. The idea of augury, or divination, says that meaning or the future can be read in the entrails of sacrificed animals or in the patterns of tea leaves. Likewise Capalino is interested in what the things around us portend. His process of assemblage invites a narrative reading, but results in a series of suggestive dead ends. If Capalino’s works augur anything, it is growth amidst toxicity, and vitality in wreckage.

Borden Capalino (b. 1980, New York, US) received his M.F.A from Hunter College in New York and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Solo exhibitions include Conciege, Ramiken Crucible, New York; Roses and Dreams, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, and SOUR, galeriepcp, Paris. Group exhibitions include Office Baroque, Brussels; Maccarone, New York; Eli Ping Frances Perkins, New York; and Kate Werble, New York among others. Capalino is represented by Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin. This is his first solo exhibition with Lyles & King.