EXHIBITIONS
To Plead is to beg, testify, confess, perform sincerity, and ask to be believed. It is also a ritual act: a speech directed outward, toward an other. The works in Plead emerge from this compromised address, where identity is not simply expressed but externalized, encoded, and offered up.
The artists are not interested in authenticity as a return to some stable inner self. Rather, they work through the overproduction of selfhood: avatars, screenshots, selfies, cute/sexy/kawaii masks, and platform-native fragments. Plead stages an ego death through the self. The self is not overcome by being stripped away, but by being pushed through too many surfaces, symbols, and iterations. Personality becomes impersonal. Persona breach into the expanded field. Painting, drawing, sculpture, and cinema appear not as life rafts for a dead internet, but as ritual technologies for handling its remains.
Plead gathers works that ask what kinds of sincerity survive inside insincerity, and what forms of selfhood must be exhausted before one can finally get outside oneself.
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Featuring work by: Anthony Yew, Dana Dawud, Poorspigga
Safiya Hawwa, Anne-Joelle Tan, Machine Yearning
Ruby Bailey
Gothic Materialism, a group exhibition featuring the artists Henry Adams, Ruby Bailey, Arna Beth, Ben Glass, Brian Oakes, and Chris Velez.
The gallery's inaugural show takes its name from Mark Fisher's 1999 PhD dissertation Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, a work that posits an aesthetic landscape on the margins of organic and nonorganic life. Gothic Materialism develops out of ongoing conversations with artists around technology's relationship with mysticism and historical consciousness. Technospiritualism operates to reconsider our present reality through the clash of transcendental and material.
Curated by Olivia Ek
Soft Systems in collaboration with Flatline Gallery present "Paths for the Study of Contingent Dimensions," a group exhibition of five artists exploring the diagram as narrative. Here, the diagram operates as a vector for world-building, constructing a new type of reality according to the patterns and structures through which the artist thinks, plotting rationality in spatial terms.
Featuring work by Vivien Adamian, J. Grace Giordano, Ian James, Tong Pan, and Deb Sokolow.