Anna Zacharoff & George Rippon

Svetlana is pleased to present Harmonie Grunge.

In a video somewhere on the Internet, a Queen Conch eats a snail and discards its empty shell to a gang of excited hermit crabs. Hermit crabs are somewhat exceptional in that they will, over the course of their lifetime, migrate from one shell to another for purely aesthetic inclinations. A lot of the time they’re not even looking for bigger shells. They simply will find a domicile that, for whatever reason, attracts their attention in new and unusual ways.

The New York Times recently ran an epic, five-day report cycle on foreign property acquisition of high-end Manhattan real estate. The piece sought to trace streams of wealth that were feeding the booming prestige real estate market via the anonymizing conduits of shell companies, and galvanized by Bloomberg-era tax incentives for foreign wealth parked in city condos. Those reports attracted an unusual volume of activity in the article’s comment section, even for the Times. Hmm.

In this exhibition, Anna Zacharoff and George Rippon arrive from their current home in Frankfurt to present works that self-consciously relish in the context of a pre-war, walk-up converted loft in the heart of Tribeca. Zacharoff hangs two painting on the gallery’s eastern wall, in which individual conch shells are rendered in restrained but mellifluous brushwork. Her canvases collect studio time in a landscape of diffuse washes of color, walking a line between chance operation and a lyrical whimsy that is entirely the artist’s own. Rippon meanwhile presents one of his cast tile pieces, for the first time migrating from the wall to floor. There, his composition lurks, evoking a folio with its narrative and framing.

Through the subtlest formal gestures, these works in concert channel a kind of dumb-faced cheeriness to the concept of inhabiting: a rental, an illegal short-term sublet, some sharing economy garbage, a cardboard box, loneliness. At once a kind of response to the worldwide and irreversible economic stratification of urban space, and on the other hand....