Sentience
Past exhibition
Overview
Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present Sentience, a group exhibition on view at the gallery’s Miami location. Curated by Lilia Kudelia.
Sentience features works by US-based and European artists that collectively reflect on the mechanisms of optics and the crucial need for new ways of relating to the planet and acquired knowledge. An important concept in ethics, sentience is connected to moral agency where it defines one’s aptitude for suffering and happiness. Manifested through the nervous system to detect and respond to stimuli, sentience precedes logics and reasoning, prioritizing self awareness and consciousness of various species - including the perceptions of humans, plants and animals, and the digital realm of artificial intelligences.
The works on display focus on sensations and emotions - as certainties. It is through these reactions that we have the ability to understand the extent of one’s own agency within global systems and the opportunity to change power dynamics - through inquiring, embracing, inverting, or unmasking etc… What is interconnected in this group exhibition is a scrutiny of the power of myths and optical phenomena.
The monumental depictions of nettles by Pavlo Kerestey and snarling dogs from Carrie Bencardino’s paintings appeal to the brain’s alert system. What may be understood as a trigger or threat at first sight can be easily tamed through the careful analysis of the mechanisms of nervous system response and the untangling of mythology. The insight of an animal’s growl and the intelligence of the plant’s stinging hair redirect attention to the idea of resources being guarded. Indeed, we should think about the value of a growl in canine communication as prevention from conflict escalation. Similarly, the needles of the stinging nettle that painfully inject histamines under human’s skin do so only at the moment of contact. More than anything, the depiction of this charismatic plant in Kerestey’s paintings reminds the viewer of inspiring stories about trickster characters in Eastern and Western mythology - saints, ascetics and fairy-tale heroes (like the 12 wild swans) - who survived by taming the dangerous plant. Much like writer Aaron Hill describes it: “Tender-handed, stroke a nettle, And it stings you for your pains. Grasp it like a man of mettle, And it soft as silk remains…”
Paula Malinowska’s video in the exhibition meditates on the mythological story of Daphne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The process of fusing human with non-human is a central motif in Malinowska’s work, which bridges bodily sensibilities with the creative potential of technologies and the role it plays in establishing new relationships between living entities. Utilizing photogrammetry technique, Malinowska transforms physical objects into 3D space embracing the mistakes and errors of computer algorithms. Inspired by the “new weird” genre of literature, the artist rethinks the myth of Daphne from the perspective of a plant being, showing the heroine’s botanical transformation as an act of resistance. The roots growing around Daphne’s body are thus no longer an act of domination as presented in the original myth but a sign of resilience, particularly relevant in the contemporary context framed by rape culture and constant attempts by politicians to control bodily autonomy. Malinowska reminds us that the metaphors from mythological stories from the “cradle of the European civilization” “suspiciously remind of the patterns of discrimination present in contemporary society.”
Arranged in the shape of Antinous constellation,* Elijah Ruhala’s exquisite watercolor paintings on burl veneer percolate his interest in the human relationship. The vignettes in his work are poetic meditations on safety and fear, connection and domination, separation and love, the sense of self and difference. Setting sumi ink into the unpredictable, scarcely absorbing grain of burl veneer is “a surrendering of control,” says Ruhala. His work builds up through the metaphoric reading of chosen materials and the meticulous study of it through the painting process, which results in unique, unreplicable composition for each piece of the wood. Burl forms in trees as a result of a fungal infection. While pushing out the parasite, the wood grain uncontrollably grows in every direction, instead of forming traditional rings. Ruhala carefully moves the ink around these blotchy surfaces to visually tell his personal stories of childhood, friendships, and romantic relations while simultaneously allowing the viewer to sense how the tree processes exterior stress and infection: “The wood is literally weeding the damage out and repairing itself simultaneously.”
In contrast to this, Joel Murray often looks at painting as a way to explore worlds or appearances existing outside of our objective reality, or, in the very least, his idea of these alternate lenses or glimpses that might appear unknowable in the moment. He imagines and then renders the illusion of a new space in a very concrete, recognizable setting – like disrupting a pre-existing landscape painting. The flowers in Murray’s Upward Garden have mimetic souls floating from their more concrete and apparent bodies. Upward Garden is an imagined, delicate, and awkward transcendence; playful in color, but acerbic in texture and surface. In Behind the Sky, Under the Dirt a duck turns insane in the corner of the shifting ground, gem colored concentric circles break apart and hold together the sky, and a blurred rabbit nearly escapes the picture. There is also a small inclusion of mica adhered to the lower right corner of the painting, which the artist found on a walk in the New Mexico mountains. These details make up an inviting and unsettled landscape. Murray’s Taco Bell Pizzaro is a composite image blending subject matter and color from Impressionist era painting with energetic design characteristics taken from Memphis architecture. The artist embraces hybridity, historical anachronisms and mixing of visual languages: “Sometimes, while I’m working, I feel like a prophetic Kool-aide Man is guiding my paintbrush, leading me to both new and established moments in art and architecture’s vast history,” says Murray.
The imposing history of architecture and its decorative elements is at the center of Danylo Halkin’s practice. His monochrome painting in the exhibition, one from the larger series, depicts a smoke-dimmed stained glass window of a Soviet era building in the Dnipropetrovsk region in Ukraine, damaged by Russian missile attacks during the ongoing war. Centuries after their initial appearances in the church architecture, stained-glass windows adorn a variety of public buildings across the post-Soviet countries - from hospitals to fire stations and military offices - where they often still perform as vistas into Soviet propaganda reality. Resembling an enlarged black-and-white illustration from an old art history book, Halkin’s work reminds about the burden of a painting to be a window-like plane through which the viewer can observe a continuation of their own space - tangible, believable, real.
Halkin’s painting is in dialogue with the digitally created works by Liz Trosper whose series Let me open a window expands on the window metaphor, which invites viewers to reconsider the boundaries between the physical and virtual, the literal and the abstract. She incorporates digital techniques and mixed media into her process which samples identifiable imagery and pure abstraction in ways that mix high-fidelity scans and intensely distorted images in motion. Trosper is deeply interested in materiality and uses the chromatic aberrations in heavily distorted scans to foreground the materiality and visual tendencies of digital media. Liz Trosper’s new work incorporates dye-sublimation printing on crepe-de-chine fabric, which refracts light in reflective pigment-based material conversation with the glowing luminosity of screens, where many of us routinely view paintings. The work traces its roots back to the history of early net art where glitch has been explored as both gesture and color field. Trosper’s painting incorporates these ephemeral digital marks with voluminous physical free-floating paint skeins.
Artem Volokitin’s painting from Afterimage series continues the exhibition narrative by immersing the viewer in moire patterns and iridescent color puddles that translate the effects of oil slick rainbows and thin layer physics. Focused on purely visual phenomena, such as blinding flares and afterimages, his work delves into deeper layers of physics, exploring the nature of light and the possibilities of its perception.
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* Named in 132 AD by the Roman emperor Hadrian after his young lover, Antinous is now an obsolete asterism, discarded in 1922.
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 3, 2024, 6 - 8.30 PM
Dates: August 3 – September 3, 2024
Gallery hours: Tue - Sat, 11 AM - 5 PM and by appointment
Location: 802 Northwest 22nd street, Miami, FL, USA, 33127
Dates: August 3 – September 3, 2024
Gallery hours: Tue - Sat, 11 AM - 5 PM and by appointment
Location: 802 Northwest 22nd street, Miami, FL, USA, 33127
Installation Views
