SPRING/BREAK 2023: Castaways

September 6 - 11, 2023

625 Madison Ave, New York, NY

Booth #1157

Castaways includes five artists from the New York area who met for the first time on the island of Crete. Recent works by Isabella Scott, Gabrielle Shelton, Mary Gagler, Kate Stone and Shelley Kirkwood include painting, alternative photographic processes, sculpture, mixed media, and sound installation. Together, the works investigate excess, exploring the tension created when natural and material richness slouches toward decay.    

In conversation, works by these five artists speak to the excitement, humor, beauty, and chaos of excess, while recognizing entropy and the anxiety that comes with inevitable decay. The subject of the exhibition is a question characteristic of our age: how to handle a wasted wealth of materials. Isabella Scott uses excess paint in an unrestrained embrace of color and pattern, putting waste on display. Gabrielle Shelton machines excess building materials, substantiating the dreamlike spaces of her cityscapes. Mary Gagler's sculptures highlight the wastefulness and cultural absurdity of excess by remixing a historical symbol of opulence, the Fabergé Egg. Kate Stone's work pushes into the personal consequences of excess with a sculptural tableau of decay that imagines an overgrowth of familiar domestic materials. Shelley Kirkwood's work serves as a reminder of nature and its fragility, using alternative photographic processes to capture ephemeral and delicate materials.  

On a superficial level, Isabella Scott's work is about pattern and color. It builds upon a universal language of both, while using one to resist the other. Pattern, something all humans recognize, is an essential aspect of humanity's survival. Color, which is used to create a dizzying effect across the paintings, can enforce or disrupt pattern. In the living painting, color is the star. Vibrancy and high contrast creates movement across the piece. It breathes life into a pattern that is essentially a basic grid. These colors are then recycled into the Waste Paintings. In the waste paintings, color is used as a random variable, as a way to explore randomness as well as to challenge the viewer to confront their natural pattern seeking behaviors. Within the waste paintings, the viewer may see a drawn pattern, however, randomized color choice and placement disguise and call pattern into question.

Brooklyn-based sculptor Gabrielle Shelton creates raw, strict, fabricated, and machined sculptures dystopian metal landscapes created in bronze, steel, and aluminum. Constructed with remnants from her architectural work, these rich materials become amulets or acknowledgements of the fact that they were left behind while the rest of their stock went off to become something fabulous, for someone fabulous. The parts from which she builds reflect the excessive opulence in the world of high-end Architectural detailing that inevitably end up as waste.    

Mary Gagler's Fabergé omelet series explores the limitations of maximalism with a visual pun on the Fabergé egg. Gagler breaks the cherished original form to explore the sin of wasted resources: if property is theft, the Fabergé egg is a bank robbery. The jeweled eggs represent a tipping point in displays of opulence- The House of Fabergé jewelry workshop in St. Petersburg produced 69 known eggs presented to members of the Russian Imperial class. The Bolsheviks nationalized the workshop following the revolution in 1918, and the eggs were later sold under Stalin for foreign currency, just three years prior to the Soviet famine of 1930-33. Breaking the eggs to make omelets destroys their coveted original form and attempts to produce a more useful commodity, although the result remains absurd and inedible.

Kate Stone's piece imagines a seated figure that  “doomscrolled” for so long they were enveloped by their environment. The piece draws on different processes of transformation: metamorphosis, petrification and spontaneous human combustion. The dark interior of the "figure" appears gooey and wet. A cell phone on the small table plays an animated loop of scrolling, black, scribbly squares and an 18hz tone, which is hardly audible to the human ear but, when loud enough, can induce nausea, feelings of dread, the feeling that there is someone standing behind you. It has been linked to experiences of the paranormal. According to NASA, 18hz is also the resonant frequency of our eyeballs so the vibrations can cause hallucinations. The bulb in the lamp flickers at 40hz - a frequency that reduces brain plaque in mice. The piece is about anxiety, transformation and the haunted body.

Shelley Kirkwood uses a process of coating a paper base with flower emulsions gathered from her immediate surroundings. This emulsion is used to record long-exposure images of natural and social events, as well as intimate portraits of people interacting with the landscape. The series reveals the cycles of growth and decay, contrasting abundance and impermanence, while showcasing the beauty and origins of the source medium material. The series offers an invitation to devotion and reverie for nature, reflecting on the fleeting aspect of time, and connection to cherished places.