Immortal Jelly

Kari Cholnoky

Mindy Rose Schwartz

Francine Spiegel

AWHRHWAR is pleased to present Immortal Jelly, featuring new sculpture and painting by Kari Cholnoky (New York) Mindy Rose Schwartz (Chicago) and Francine Spiegel (Los Angeles)

Ladies and gentlemen, the Human Mind: a fathomless abyss and a rancid bog. In future fantasies, the cleansed mind awakens from its troubles, delivered to a digital hereafter. But here and now, in between our skulls, we are soiled. We tread in curdled shallows and dip our heads in litter. We are boiled to pulp. What’s left floats in streams of color on the surface, and sinks in heavy chunks.

In Kari Cholnoky’s low relief paintings, fragments of synthetic body parts and technological dross coalesce in dense, chromatic masses. Within their geologic complexions, degraded images lifted from consumer product pages and news sites—reprinted on saturated WalMart fleece—erupt from fields of engorged circuitry, resembling rogue pop-up windows or scabs. Cholnoky’s mottled, swollen surfaces display an accelerated sedimentation of frenzied particles, like asteroids embedded with crashed, still-broadcasting satellites. Consuming and expelling their own data in a churning digestive loop, the paintings embody an odd loveliness of discharged viscera, erotic prosthetics, and telecast signals, scattered across bright extraterrestrial soil.

In her textile sculptures, Mindy Rose Schwartz gathers and unravels reclaimed fabrics, used clothes and errant jewels, revealing traces of lingering spirits in deconstructed consignment shop couture. Her flayed garments balance hints of violence with an uncommon tenderness, as Schwartz conjures eerily familiar characters from warp and woof. Hovering between disoriented scrap and joyful image, her soft works and small bronzes reanimate half-remembered DIY projects like the pantyhose doll and the beaded ribbon, bringing uneasy life back to abandoned cloth and hobbyist accessories. Schwartz teases out empathic notes from these homespun disciplines, even as her cracked revisions of hippie craft evoke unsettling new sensations.

Francine Spiegel’s paintings summon viscosity and ooze as primeval forces and states of being. They depict deeply processed images of bodies that emerge in glimpses from miasmal pools of smeared, ecstatic color. Veering from gestural haziness to crystalline classicism, Spiegel’s canvases are swampy atmospheres of cyber-superfluity, like high-resolution laser prints lost in puddles of oil and algae. Her subjects, themselves mired in rendered layers of indeterminate muck, display an assured feminine agency, while simultaneously melting into their feverishly unglued surroundings. Spiegel’s hybrid figures derive from her own accreted database—chimerical apparitions of harlequins, warriors, scarecrows, and other shuffled archetypes, all caught in the flux of a distorting glitch.

Kari Cholnoky (b. Stamford, CT) holds an MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, and a BA from Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include True Level at Safe Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, Kari Cholnoky + Landon O’Brien at Big Medium, Austin, TX, and Semi Lucid Steaks at David Klein Gallery, Detroit, MI. Recent group exhibitions include Esurient Eyes at Regina Rex, New York, NY, Please Mr. Postman, curated by Won Eh at Essex Flowers, New York, NY, Shampoo Effect at MASS Gallery, Austin, TX, and Mallrats, curated by 100% Gallery at Et Al etc, San Francisco, CA. Cholnoky was awarded the 2017 Fountainhead Residency in Miami, FL, and was the recipient of a 2014 Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Emerging Artist Award. Cholnoky has been featured in Maake Magazine, Editorial Magazine, and in “Habitat: Kari Cholnoky” on ArtNews. In August, Cholnoky was featured in a two-person exhibition with Caroline Wells Chandler at Left Field Gallery in San Luis Obispo, CA.

Mindy Rose Schwartz (b. Chicago, IL) holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, and a BFA in Sculpture from the University of Illinois in Champaign, IL. Schwartz has had recent solo exhibitions at Balice Hertling, Paris, FR, Queer Thoughts, New York, NY, Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA, and Slow Gallery, Chicago, IL. Recent group exhibitions include How Deep is Your Love? at Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada, The Weeping Line at Alter Space/Four Six One Nine, Los Angeles, CA, Saint-Cirq Lapopie Biennale at Saint-Cirq Lapopie, FR, and Putrid Garden- Luis Miguel Bendaña at Efrain Lopez, Chicago, IL. Schwartz was a recipient of the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Foundation Arts Achievement Award, and also received a 3Arts Residence Fellowship. Schwartz has been featured in Artforum, ArtNews, Frieze, Art in America, Living Content, Newcity Art, The Chicago Tribune, and Whitewalls, among other publications. Current and forthcoming exhibitions include Interface Gallery, Oakland, CA and Room E-10 27, Berlin, DE.

Francine Spiegel (b. Miami, FL) holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. Recent exhibitions include Extra at The Hole, New York, NY, Providence curated by Jonas Delaborde at Musée International des Arts Modestes, Sète, FR, and Grand Opening at Allouche Gallery, New York, NY. Previous exhibitions include The Visit, LOYAL, Malmö, Sweden, Con Amore, Leif Djurhuus Collection, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark, Dadarhea, curated by Jim Drain and Devin Flynn, CANADA, New York and OHWOW, Miami, Portugal Arte 10: A Survey of Contemporary Art, Lisbon, Portugal, Mud and Milk, Deitch Projects, New York, NY, and 60 Artists on the New York Scene, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow and MACRo Future Museum, Rome. Spiegel has been featured in Clark Magazine, Vogue, I-D Magazine, The Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. Spiegel’s site-specific installation Beam On, presented in collaboration with LOYAL, was on view from June 21 through July 21 in Mt. Washington, Los Angeles, CA.