Tender like asphalt
Xiaochi Dong, Kalpesh Lathigra and Juliette Lena Hagar
10 Nov - 22 Dec
Sherbet Green
To contemplate the self as an intricate landscape, is to liken identity to roads of transient impressions. In the liminal spaces within our individual topographies, where contours blur and edges dissolve, observers engage in introspective wanderings.
Currently on at Sherbet Green, 'Tender like asphalt' features works by artists Xiaochi Dong, Kalpesh Lathigra, and Juliette Lena Hagar. The artistic practice of each can be surmised as circumscribing the breadth of being—contemplations revolving around the individual and their positioning within social constructs that delineate life. The artworks traverse dialogues, weaving journeys with diverse cadences and converging elements, where subjectivity and perception are interlaced with universal truths and unchanging principles.
Interlocutions between materiality, process, and the ephemeral unfold within the exhibition, with the mediums of painting, found object, and photography serving as conduits for exploration. The exhibition invites viewers into a nuanced viewing of the interplay between these elements, creating a space where the tangible and the intangible converge.
The vast emptiness of distance and immaterial expanses are meditative places where one can exhale.
Xiaochi Dong’s paintings provide both latitude and a means to enter into the curatorial dialogue of the show. Discreetly hanging in the space, these small-scale works, neutral and benign, act as a clandestine entry point to the exhibition.The initial impression of these unobtrusive canvases might be easily missed or dismissed, lacking a jarringly immediate presence. However, their function gradually unfolds upon introspection, gently permeating the space.
Dong’s inspiration is drawn from the boundless expanses of the natural world, teeming with multitudes and minuscules, with a particular focus on artificial landscapes. It may be said such spaces are where the human preoccupation lies with occupation. Assaying and arrangement of the natural world, structuring and ordering elements, striving for functionality and harmony. Intervention is perhaps fundamental to human’s fascination with environments. The will to impose limits, to condense, to restructure, to bend it to our liking, is a quest to confine the unknown other. Order, sequence. It is all an intricate choreography - and an act of dominion.
The small-scale canvases by Dong allude to a larger other, suggesting a spiritual journey in the fringes of perception and the recesses of consciousness. The exhibition text introduces the concept of "woyou," akin to "wandering while lying down," portraying the works as both boundless and bounded, like an imagined ocean in a seashell, we hear the rush of our own blood in our ears.
There is a flux between speciality and perception when trying to follow the ontological relationship between nature, humans, and the workings of the inner mind. To dream in monochrome, wander in the mind. Benign linen, pastel inks, and volcanic ash hinting at fragility, transience, and the primordial.
The reverie is ephemeral and cyclical. Situated in the vacant space of mindful/quiet contemplation, space in this sense exists as both void and conduit, where tension is married to calm stillness, extending beyond the conventions of TIME and materiality.
It is a space where expanses exist both condensed and stretched, realms in a continuum, traversing dimensions and connecting to something transcendental.
Movement occurs in the textured echoes of potentiality.
The physicality in Juliette Lena Hagar’s sculptural assemblages is the counterpoint to the ethereality of Dong’s practice, creating a dynamic interplay between tangible and intangible elements.
An archive of sorts emerges from the mundane ephemera of life; artefacts of another's past, some stranger’s history, someone else’s lore. The installations begin to make an eerie sort of sense in the aural tone of the exhibition, with marks of attrition and careful arrangements hinting at a tangibility that is atemporal, achronological.
The materiality of adornment and banality is meticulously considered. The physicality and wear present in the fragments is liminality in emblematic form. Having been plucked from time's grasp, these miscellaneous items are suspensions in a disrupted continuity where identity and event/action become elusive. Perceptions are cleaved, self-evident realities are reconstituted. The nostalgia is familiar, unsettlingly, it is also not.
Within Hagar’s assemblages, navigating the terrain of individual and collective experience, placement is a board-game with rules open to interpretation.
Free associations within and beyond Hagar’s works pick at ingrained mechanisms and dynamics defining social structures, human interaction, ceremony, and routine. Objects are leveraged, introduced to play, emancipated from past and predetermined narratives. The visual language is tactile and speaks of function and states of being. Existence is an open place of potentials where authenticity is tested, materiality is a choreography and the choreography contemplates the fluid nature of reality. Play is in the simulation of presence, play occurs in the experience of performance and the absurdity found within the ideas of memory and veracity.
The unsettlingly comforting idea emerges that transformation is a road map on which a compass swings and points to elusive truths. The human essence, a mosaic of layered narratives, emblems, and experiences, unfurls and contracts at the intersections and crossroads.
Connection is found by navigating the non-linear lanes of selfhood.
Through the space and thematic scaffolding of the show, subjectivity and constructed narratives are balancing elements in the photography of Kalpesh Lathigra. Just as Dong and Hagar interrogate materiality in abstract terms to create expansive artworks and redefine the terms of interaction and engagement, the medium of photography itself is harnessed to shape how we receive and fit into our realities.
Within the mesh of his works, Lathigra acts as somewhat of an initiator and historian, where subjectivity is interwoven in the constructed observations marking the existence of figures, events, and space. Curating the uncannily familiar, memory and nostalgia become a collective experience, crafting mythology from the fragments of unspoken stories.
For Lathigra, the photographic process is an act that shapes narratives. Pictures are totems of personhood; the individual, space, presence, and absence are bound to the medium. Polaroid, camera-less techniques, and film techniques are tools from which the artist extracts shared humanity. A levelling occurs from the universality of portraits and snapshots, where the notions of identity and individuality become flattened and then opened up, existing in non-hierarchical states.
There is liminality to the picture as an object, an intermediary in the linearity of time. It is a node on the self, marking passage and transformation, allowing for play with one’s chronology and presence. The snapshot becomes the only material remnant of the existence of something temporal, heavy with subjective nostalgia that comes with reflections on time’s passing, of vacancy.
In this playground of exploration, constructs of identity are synthesised and recontextualised. Staging is a term of engagement, an intermediary place, and portrayal is a form of suspension. The imprints etched in the cartography of uncharted selfhood. Existence is shaped by the weight of memory and anticipation.
Sherbet Green’s exhibition, ‘Tender like asphalt’ contemplates life’s constant ebb and flow, the ceaseless metamorphosis of circumstances, to reveal the inherent absurdity of change itself. The capricious nature of change challenges our comprehension and senses. Through the works of each artist, we encounter introspection, ephemeral glimpses of moments in time, and the elusive, transitional spaces that often escape our conscious awareness. Lines of communication, interplay and consequences, are enigmatic orchestrations in constructed realities. Observation and action are temporal milestones in the tapestry of our shared history. The absurdity of order and continuity in the often unpredictable narrative of human existence is a spectrum of tactile truths.
Human experience, is a perpetual oscillation.
10 Nov - 22 Dec
Unit 1
2 Treadway St,
London E2 6QW