Transmutations

Upstairs

Sascha Braunig

Jules Gimbrone

Piero Golia

Brook Hsu

Anicka Yi

Bortolami Gallery is pleased to present Transmutations, a group show focused on works which serve as conduits for material transformation and multivalent possibility.

The show is titled after a series by Jules Gimbrone, Traps and Transmutations, in which sound interacts with substances such as melting ice and bubbling water serve as analog to the transmutable body and trans experience. In the audio, Gimbrone’s own (highly modulated) voice repeats the words “convex” and “concave,” a reference to the peaks and valleys of soundwaves and an intimation of bodily physique.

Piero Golia presents a living artwork: a sleek marble pedestal displaying a wood ikebana whose surface is covered in mushrooms. The orange-red fungi will continue to grow throughout the course of the exhibition, altering and evolving its form. In this sense Golia functions as a choreographer of kinetic experience, providing an initial set of materials and conditions and allowing time itself to sculpt the artwork.

Brook Hsu’s painting Sada depicts Sada Abe, a character in the 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses, a meditation on love known for its explicit, erotic content. The film is based on a real geisha and sex worker who strangulated her lover to death and carried his severed genitals with her in the days following his murder. Sada’s likeness is outlined in pearly, opalescent blues over a dense and otherworldly field of green shellac inks.

Anicka Yi’s illuminated sculptures question the increasingly hazy taxonomical distinctions between what is human, animal, plant and machine. Undulipodia, a prismatic column constructed in hard maple and silicone, evokes the structure and translucence of a Japanese shoji screen. Within a cubic recess hang suspended beakers filled with green resin, their contents resembling algae. And Inhaling A Million Stars, a large wall sculpture, features a UV print of a bacterial culture beneath a maze-like architectural pattern in clear acrylic, its unique aesthetic suggestive of mycelial hyphae as much as an electrical grid.

Sascha Braunig’s painting, Clutches 3, features a composition cinched by the grasp of a clutching, anthropomorphized wire figure, its hoop-like “body” resembling a corset. It captures a dynamic moment in which two dissonant elements merge into a singular form. It is a material translation of an immaterial concept – the power dynamics of societal constructs and the pressure of individuals to conform to larger, hegemonic systems.