New York based artists Loney Abrams and Johnny Stanish have taken interest in the relationships between an object’s outward appearance, and the object’s intrinsic material makeup — its ingredients list, its nutritional value, its metadata — and the potential for this material to embody FDA politics. So Much Dirt But Not Enough Soil utilizes materials like Miracle Grow, live active culture l. acidophilus, liquid THC, the introduction to Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman (shredded and pulped), yellow #5, ginkgo biloba, Flavor Dynamics’ CHEF-ASSIST® Harvest Spice Flavoring, 3-methyl butanoic acid (the smell of body odor), crushed Adderall, aspartame, among others.

Part of Knockdown Center’s Ruin Series, the exhibition is held within the remains of a century-old stone building, which encompasses three separate rooms, one of which has no roof and is exposed to the elements. Soap wall pieces cast in relief, potentially lathered by rain and humidity, match one another in form, while their varied material makeups describe a society that tends to overprescribe and sanitize. A miniature war game terrain board suggests a terraformed mars. Seasonal Affect Disorder (SAD) lamps act as light boxes to illuminate handmade watermarked paper. Dispensers filled with DIY plant food include ingredients like worm poop and Bud Lite Lime. And images that link Michelle Obama’s partnership with Subway and her White House garden initiatives are intermixed with Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa seeds deregulated by the very same Obama Administration, in handmade paper wall pieces.

Not unlike the consumer’s experience in the grocery store, where food products are accompanied by text listing ingredients and nutritional value (along with marketing copy), the art consumer is presented with language — title, date, dimensions, materials, a press release — that may reveal meaning illegible in the work itself. In the bread aisle, two loaves of bread may look nearly identical in form, but to the discerning consumer, their ancillary texts reveal two distinct products in support of vastly differing production methods, political economies, and consequences: one ingredients list reads ‘flour, water, yeast, salt’ while the other lists fourteen ingredients, more than half of which are names of chemical compounds. This ancillary text places the ethical burden on the consumer to make the right choice; rather than find an alternative to plastic, Poland Springs urges their customers to recycle their bottles. We’ve learned that the products we consume, whether food, drugs, or hygienic products, are defined not by what they appear to be but by what they are made of and how they are produced; they are intrinsically political. In the same way that we can no longer assume a wall piece is made of paint and canvas, we’re both burdened and enlightened by the text, or metadata, that accompany the objects that surround us.

Loney Abrams (b. 1986, Boston MA) and Johnny Stanish (b. 1983, Great Falls MT) both received their MFAs from Pratt Institute in 2013. They’ve been working collaboratively since 2014. Recent solo (collaborative) exhibitions include Gluteus Maximus at Java Projects in Brooklyn, and Polly wants a cracker and distressed denim from Forever 21 at Beverly’s in New York. Recent group exhibitions include Ashes/Ashes in Los Angeles, Regina Rex in New York, and Material Art Fair in Mexico City. Abrams and Stanish also run hotel-art.us, a curatorial initiative that installs temporary exhibitions in unlikely spaces for the purposes of generating documentation for online audiences. Their forthcoming solo exhibition at Sadie Halie Projects in Minneapolis opens October 22nd.

In Hito Steyerl’s timely essay, “In Defense of the Poor Image” she writes:

The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation. In short: it is about reality.

The title, Event Horizon, refers to the point of no return, no looking back, a precipice, the threshold between space and non-space. The artists exhibited manifest these ideas both objectively and subjectively, using the concept of “landscape” as a subject or a place of action, theoretically or literally. Each artist is distinct in his/her use of media and strategies of representation, but all are concerned with the edge between the screen and reality, as a place of manipulation and interpretation.

By confusing the relationships between the hand and digital and physical space, Leah Beeferman’s works invent intricate in-between spaces which mirror the theoretical ideas of abstract physics. These works contribute to a larger, ongoing study of digital drawing loosely inspired by a theory in quantum physics which states that pure empty space is not empty and is, in fact, quite dense. As Beeferman integrates digital drawing practices with photographic material, laser-etching, or software such as After Effects, the work avoids true physicality. It remains primarily digital; residing between file and viewer experience, it mirrors the interpretation and subsequent imagining of scientific theory.

Jerstin Crosby’s work embodies a unique sense of otherworldliness derived from a combination of experimental animation techniques. The simple and hypnotic scenes are crafted from original footage, 3D models, and drawing. His approach to creating these process-laden videos balances the medium against the heavily coded content which it abstracts. The work, often dark and mysterious, engages an awareness, or anxiety perhaps, about our understanding of the “real” and “natural” world.

Steve Gurysh explores wild economies of objects, events, and digital artifacts to create new forms of alterity through physical and time-based media. While his process employs methods of research, interpolating the histories of material science, cinema, digital imaging and fabrication, illogical premises often drive his work towards inventive scenarios. Here, storytelling becomes active through a productive process, weaving mythological frameworks, historical narrative, and invented experience into potent objects and public interventions.

Travelling to remote landscapes and taking geological/astronomical events as found footage of the world, artist Elizabeth McTernan uses actions (or “non-vicarious encounters”), installation, drawing, lithography, sound, and storytelling to construct spaces that are both literal and literary. She creates a narrative structure for the reconsideration of perception, setting the curved horizon of landscape into tension with the square horizons of screens, speakers, documents, and images. Her art works navigate representational and conceptual rifts in the Earthling day-to-day, via direct bodily gesture in the liminal passage.

About the curator:
Jessica Langley (b. 1981, USA) is a multimedia artist based in NYC whose work considers place, landscape, and the sublime through the vernacular as well as popular iconography. She has exhibited her work internationally, and has been an artist-in-residence in numerous programs including Skaftfell Center of Visual Art in Iceland, Askeaton Contemporary Art in Ireland, the SPACES World Artist Program in Cleveland, and the Digital Painting Atelier at OCAD-U in Toronto. She was a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship for research in Iceland, and earned her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2008. She the founding director of the Stephen and George Laundry Line, a site for public art in Ridgewood, Queens.