Brian Zegeer, video excerpt from Anxiety Engine and Inhibitor, 2024, acrylic on canvas, yarn, and steel mesh around found monitors, cg animations, pigment print on bond paper backdrop, black sand, 120” x 96” x 24”
Hyphae
David Onri Anderson, Francis Dot, Sadé DuBoise, Kanetaka Ikeda, Carlie Kinto, Catherine Sieck, Petra Szilagyi, Jessie Rose Vala, Brian Zegeer
Curated by Sharon Servilio
October 3 - November 2, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 3, 5-8pm
Gallery 114, 1100 NW Glisan St.
Portland, OR in the Pearl District
Open Thursday - Sunday, 12-5pm
Gallery 114 is pleased to present Hyphae, a group exhibition converging nine artists whose work evokes an ecological mysticism. Working in two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and time-based media, these artists take inspiration from ancestral ways of relating to the world as well as the futuristic possibilities of speculative fiction. In some cases, they draw on geometry and symbols from sacred art traditions, or abstracted renderings of cosmic and organic bodies. Some artists work with hybridity, merging the human and non-human in uncanny ways, unsettling notions of our separateness from nature.
This work is in dialogue with a broader context. There has lately been a widespread interest in spiritualist abstraction of the early 20th century, such as work by Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton. Works like Wangechi Mutu’s sculpture and Jeff Vandermeer’s fiction explore a fluid hybridity of human bodies and technology with non-human sentience, resulting in what writer Elvia Wilk calls “the new weird divine.” In this era of climate collapse, when the powerful display nihilistic contempt for both human and non-human life, a mycelial network of artists, writers, and scientists are making work for a future in which interspecies interdependence is valued. Hyphae surveys a multiplicity of approaches by artists from the Pacific Northwest and across the United States.
Special Events:
Saturday, October 5, 3pm: Artist panel with Francis Dot, Carlie Kinto, and Jessie Rose Vala
Wednesday, October 16, 5pm PST: Virtual artist talk with David Onri Anderson
Saturday, November 2, 4:30pm: Closing performance with guest musician Neolith
In Brian Zegeer’s animations, we enter a world where scale and taxonomies are disconcerted - bodies appear human yet morph with the fluidity of cephalopods and the permeability of microorganisms. The video screens are enveloped in sculptures of found textile and plastic, inviting us into a participatory tactile space, defying the abstract, detached smoothness with which we normally encounter technology. Sadé DuBoise’s paintings merge human and spider, creating a mythic being that embodies her experience juggling multiple identities as artist, mother, and wife. The interspecies hybrid evokes both the strangeness of inhabiting a body altered by the metamorphosis of parenthood, and the resilience offered by a resourceful organism that continuously remakes its world, spinning webs to maintain its home and sustenance.
Francis Dot dismantles destructive iconography by physically melting, hollowing, and cutting apart symbols of militaristic and religious institutions, then reconstitutes those elements into a speculative mythology through collage and sculpture. His book Ploceidae, the story of interdimensional travelers who weave the universe, invokes an illuminated manuscript invaded by nightmarish mushroom clouds from another century. Jessie Rose Vala’s sculptures suggest the sense of time-traveling in multiple directions at once - of standing before mysterious deities in an ancient temple while also surrounded by futuristic technologies and organisms yet to evolve. Built with ceramic, cast glass, brass, and neon, they appear as artifacts of a new ecologically-centered religion on an alien planet that’s somehow our own. Catherine Sieck also draws on symbolism of ancient origin, working with archetypal imagery from ancestral and folk art traditions to create a personal cosmology that honors cycles of birth, marriage, death, and rebirth. Her flower paintings are cradled within shaped, embossed copper frames that imbue them with the devotional qualities of a ritual object.
Kanetaka Ikeda’s personal cosmology is rooted in a dream from over thirty years ago, in which he witnessed the universe in the form of a tree, with spiraling suns and stars unfurling through space as if sprouting from branches of gravity. Since then, he has been making a constellation of works that celebrate the unity and individuality of all things, including sculptures built from organic materials that feel both ethereal and earthly. Petra Szilagyi similarly embeds mystical ideas in material form, tracing energy flows in esoteric maps and diagrams on objects carved from wood or sculpted in mud. Their interdisciplinary practice places scholarship and spirituality in dialogue with art-making, with projects from installing an immersive prayer environment in a museum to speaking at parapsychology conferences on the aesthetics of revelatory experiences.