Red Sky at Morning

Lower Level

Marlon Kroll

Catherine Telford Keogh

Joani Tremblay

Presented by Calaboose, Montreal

Referencing an age-old maritime rhyme, Red Sky at Morning offers a speculative meditation on the evolving relationship between humans and water in the wake of climate change. As rising sea levels become an increasing threat to New York City, Red Sky at Morning is a premonition; a near future where neighborhoods submerge as tides ebb and flow over basketball courts, apartment complexes, and bookshops.

Kroll’s interest in cyclical systems and hydrophobia emerge in new illustration, sound, and sculpture. Air conditioning fans can be heard in the stairwell, a cold descent into Interstate’s basement project space. Fans are also found in Climate Control (2019) depicting a fictitious geoengineering project designed to lower the Earth’s temperature by evaporating water at a cosmic scale. Rendered here as science fiction, Climate Control mimics real-life “solutions” to climate change currently under development.

Telford Keogh’s sculptures sit on the gallery floor as cross-sections of capitalist ruin. Dill pickles, Q-tips, hot peppers and Dial soap, among other items, are suspended in engorged pools, reflecting accelerated habits of consumption and disposal. On the West wall, layers of images and text are tinted by chemical detergents. Encased, these everyday objects become relics of another epoch. Equally confined, Demeter XAquaBrickX (2019), houses Kroger® Red Delicious Apple scaffolds cut into alphabet letters containing MCF-7 mammary cancer cells transfected with jellyfish DNA, drawing our sensitivities towards the development of new chimeric-chthonic entities at the micro level.

Layering deep oceanic and cold concrete tones, Tremblay’s works of oil on linen trace an unsettling harmony between the manufactured and the natural. As these material worlds collide, new and polluted landscapes emerge where labels and styrofoam packaging coexist with mutating flora, fossils, and frogs. Her paintings forecast the developing textures of plant and animal species as they adapt to harsh meteorological changes.

Calaboose is a nomadic curatorial project by artist Garrett Lockhart and writer Danica Pinteric. Presently in a converted carriage house in Montreal, Quebec, Calaboose has mounted exhibitions, offsites, and special projects since its formation in late 2017. In the Fall of 2019, Calaboose will relocate to Amsterdam and continue mounting exhibitions somewhere along the Dutch countryside.