Leaking Heaven

Peggy Chiang, Covey Gong, Hongyan, Kinke Kooi, Michelle Rosenberg, Amina Ross, Eric Sidner

Laurel Gitlen presents Leaking Heaven, a group exhibition.

This group exhibition gathers several works that are characterized by state changes. Architecture gives way to drooping textiles, liquids harden, and matter diffuses into thin air –– an upending of material that posits an alternative ethos, an unsettling of terms, or an insistence on flux. It might also be a collection of synecdochical propositions - of tools, objects and fragments that interrogate social and cultural situations.

Many of the works in this exhibition are acts of transcription, sublimation, and dissolution. Embracing hybridity, each artist creates a sense of beautiful excess in distinct ways. Together, the works suggest a spilling-over of meaning and form where matter and structure become aqueous or soft, and bodies merge with the natural, built and object-world. In turns sensuous and transcendent, transgressive or menacing, liquidity (both literal and figurative) opens up possibilities for things to flow, seep, merge and grow. Reversals of agency between environments and bodies disrupt systemic power. Boundaries are breached; bodies, buildings and nature collapse. Psychedelic, grotesque and unstable surfaces drive the mundane and quotidian into the fantastic and sublime.

Gilded driftwood, restaurant paraphernalia, whorls and ruffles, used broom and toothbrush bristles, and a swimmer’s head encased in a glass lamp. Breasts, arabesques, an elegant backbone, a sine wave, and a window grid dyed green. Water overhead. A boat in a rainstorm. A brain in a venetian glass orb, a snowglobe.