Everything is Everything

The indoor gallery will host creep is my kink, a five person exhibition exploring the tension between materials, systems, and identities when they fuse and transform. Images circulate into objects and back again, moving between digital and physical processes. Photography becomes sculpture, organic matter meets industrial fabrication, and materials hover in states of flux, just before fracture or transformation. The show includes paper collage, textile collage, photography, and wall and floor sculpture from Natalie Beall, John DeSousa, Yi Hsuan Lai, Gracelee Lawrence, and Greeshma Chenni Veettil. 

The show’s title references the material sciences measure of creep, wherein solid materials undergo gradual deformation from persistent mechanical stress. Particularly in engineering, it is a threshold marker between utility and futility determined by time, pressure, and temperature. This idea - of pushing the limit of matter and function - is shared across the artists’ practices and is explored throughout the presented artworks by way of the things we consume, the technologies and objects of our everyday conveniences, and the body itself. With the title also referencing the Chappell Roan song “My Kink is Karma”, Hirshfield points to the pop-song-sweet aesthetic of the exhibition and a sumptuous play on the double-meaning of kink (as in bend). 

The skeletons of Veettil’s most recent sculptures are made from refrigerator coils to purposefully break down the structure - literally and figuratively - of cold technology. In Lawrence’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space scans of nasturtium leaves become transfigured into 3D printed framing and spliced into their digitally disfigured hands. DeSousa’s wall works collapse the histories of quilting and photoshopping by printing mined internet memes and public domain photos onto fabric. Beall reimagines household functional objects as ornamental paper constructions with Shaker-esque precision. Lai’s images digest and regurgitate discarded ephemera and her own likeness through documentation, projection, installation, and re-photographing - simultaneously mirroring the otherness of immigrant life. 

Creep here becomes a challenge to stasis, a questioning of the integrity of human-first systems, an intrigue for the cusp of breakdown, and a revelry for all that exists beyond the threshold. Creep rupture - or creep failure - often defines the point of structural collapse. For these artists, failure marks a beginning point.