METANOESIS
NOV 23, 2016 – JAN 29, 2017
OPENING RECEPTION: WED NOVEMBER 23, 2016, 7-9PM
Curated by Piril Gunduz
Curatorial Assistants: Yangxingyue Wang, Isabella Kapur
From darkness within about darkness out there.
With the initiation of its new studio structure, The Hollows is dedicating the
facades and stairwells of the 5-floor building to gallery space for “Metanoesis.”
Noesis: understanding solely through the intellect.
“In crude summary, Aristotle distinguishes between noesis, as instantaneous
intuition of truth and dianoia, as progressive critical reasoning.”
In an attempt to mark making of various scales about Being and Spirituality,
“Metanoesis” exhibits systems of materials that are emblematic of their artists’
inferences after their experiences of noetic moments, visually and physically manifested
equations that emphasize a wide range of concepts important to
their artists, translating their revelations into morphisms for the viewers to follow.
They are procedural art works whose functions do not always necessarily treat
variables from the visitors as inputs but do require them to invest a spatial and
time-based involvement for the systems to reveal their outcomes, for arguments
that renew and achieve themselves in every iteration. They are firstly
mechanisms of coping with the unknown that always appears to have the first
move.
Matthew Keff’s live animation installation “Starry Eyed Dreamer,” an indoor artificial sky, weaves an absurd daydream in floating smiling stars and swirling streamers, under which visitors could sit and lie. Bridging past and present, physical and spiritual, Julia Lee L Hong’s doodle in pencil “Prism” registers her secular embodiment of St. Francis’s suffering—bleeding in her new shoes from skin peeling and her underwear from menstruation; while her textual piece “Here, in the Sun’s Air” invites visitors into the room of love where ancient myths are repeatedly intoned. Tomie Seo’s “Faceless Mask,” attempting to break people’s stereotypical impression of Muslims, achieves a perfect tautology. Ariel Ruvinsky highlights the way esoteric symbolism has become contemporized using materials from two disparate landscapes—the natural and the electrical. The reflexive and meditative actions of tearing and folding in Sierra Ortega’s performance “Lotus’ for Korihor” transform the textual into the visual and manifest the artist’s new sense of self-enlightenment through her culminating pond of Lotus blossoms. Piril Gunduz’s sculptural installations “Greenpoint May 13” and “Mouintin’” are of contrasting materials, for the former, she uses body molds of pinkish silicone, presented stretched to a point where they become flat and for the latter, hardware—metal screws, washers and bolts in which the system is built imperfectly, with a lot of manoeuvre.
