Rae Klein

The light switch is Emperor over a windowless room. You grasp at the wall for it, praying not to crack a shin or smash your head. In the absence of power there is blackness. Shapes and figures may or may not exist under its cloak, scale and depth are a mystery. You find the switch, and with it, clarity. You’re in a large, extravagantly set dining room. No one has been here for years, decades, but you’ve visited before under closed eyelids. Now flip off: blackness again. Now flip on: the dining room. Now off-on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off-on and so forth, until the forms and silhouettes blend with the blackness, and new, familiar characters emerge in the in-between: a dog, a horse, a bird, a shell.

Low Voice Out Loud, Rae Klein’s first solo exhibition with Nicodim, is a series of personal and biographical portraits of traumas and delights blended together when the power flips on-off, on-off, etc. Each canvas is a window from a perspective that switches between omnipotence and weightlessness at a moment’s notice. In “Burn to the Ground,” a silhouette foregrounds a candelabra, inversing the relationship between shadow and cave wall and exposing the very source of light. “Glass Pony” depicts a pony-shaped portal between the viewer’s perch and a constellation of nearby stars. “In the Highest House in the Whole City” is an aura-Polaroid of the surreal and the sublime. These are the quiet moments between darkness and light, the low voice sung out loud.

Rae Klein (b. 1995) lives and works in Michigan. She graduated from Eastern Michigan University in 2017 with a BFA in Painting. Waiting in the Field, her first solo exhibition, took place at The Valley in Taos, New Mexico in 2021. Group exhibitions include End of Eden, Galerie Wolfsen, Aalborg (2022); Todos es de Color, The Curator’s Room, Amsterdam (2022); Paper., Beers London, London (2022); I Have My Eye On You, Everyday Gallery, Antwerp (2021); When Shit Hits The Fan Again, Guts Gallery, London (2021).