The Third Kind

Megumi Shauna Arai, Charlotte vander Borght, Catharine Czudej, Miranda Fengyuan Zhang, Myranda Gillies, Aislinn McNamara, Eric Oglander Management is pleased to present The Third Kind, an exhibition curated by Lola Kramer and Loup Sarion. Neither distinctly painting nor sculpture, most of the works in this show come into being through a dedication to the object and its physicality. In response to the panorama of recent art heavily relying on image-making, this show seeks to reassess the place of material, craft, and form. There is boundless freedom in breaking away from the culture of the screen, and each of these artists has found new paths working from a pure, tangible desire intensely rooted in material. Emerging through various approaches, ranging from weaving to carpentry, casting, hand-stitching, and even alchemy: all of the work is made by artists living in New York City. Several artists are breathing new life into natural materials. Aislinn McNamara's wall-mounted nylon reliefs are meticulously stitched and stretched over metal armatures, creating intricate cavities. Their undulating surfaces are coated with layers of pigments, including shades like "severed-head red" and "Francis Bacon cobalt," which the artist sourced during her travels near the ruins of Herculaneum. The work is as inspired by ancient civilizations as it is by visualizing the gurgling, sputtering, and sucking sounds of a volcano or a "minor-key shriek" in a Coltrane composition. An impulse to record the natural world reverberates nearby in the alchemical reliefs of Catharine Czudej, created by dipping an aluminum frame into a vat of liquid Bismuth, an element used in Pepto-Bismol and eyeshadow. It emerges transformed, its iridescent crystalline surface responding to the precise conditions it is born into. Many of these artworks engage the formal language of painting, as seen in the fiber-based experiments of Myranda Gillies, the hand-woven textiles of Miranda Fengyuan Zhang, or Megumi Shauna Arai's gestural めぐりあい I (Encounter I), constructed by stitching hand-dyed silk soaked in walnut and variations of logwood, pinned in a windswept motion. Appearing frozen in time, it serves as a reminder that the dynamics of power and submission, identity, and the essence of the human experience do not wholly rely on its explicit representation. A different engagement with the history of painting is present in a new three-dimensional series by Charlotte vander Borght. Cast from scuffed subway seats that have fallen into disuse, they are inverted and treated like a canvas, made obscene, even debased. Giving the impression of peeling off the wall, their relationship to the body falls further into abstraction. Recently, Eric Oglander, a naturalist and avid collector of folk art, asked ChatGPT how it would make the minimal handmade "objects of happenstance" that line the shelves in his studio. It got close. He fed the software a set of familiar materials: striped blue fabric, branches, plywood, and white paint. Whether this hypothetical artwork would contain the auratic touch of a fisherman with an eye for accidental souvenirs is hard to say. I would like to think the rippling moiré effect produced in Crops Circles is more like the construction of a song. "Songs arise out of suffering," wrote Nick Cave in a blog post last January, "by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don't feel." To that end – how can the material experience of the art object, and the finesse that brings it to life, reaffirm a relation to the physical, irreplaceable essence of human creativity? If society's ongoing inclination is to reproduce representations of our everyday life through computation, perhaps it is time to reconsider the place of craft and material within contemporary art. —Lola Kramer Lola Kramer (b. 1990, Los Angeles, California) is a curator, writer, and editor based in New York City. She was the curator of Liz Magic Laser's Frieze Project at Frieze New York 2023, and is known for her essays, profiles, and interviews with pioneers of creative disciplines. She was the curator of 7 Gardens, a public art exhibition throughout the community gardens in the Lower East Side, conceived with Joseph Ian Henrikson as a journey connecting local community space to the practices of established and emerging artists working to represent ideas of nature and community engagement. She was recently selected by Cultured magazine as one of 8 young curators to watch and a leading expert and advocate for the next generation of artists and change-makers. Kramer’s writing has been featured in numerous publications, including the Whitney Biennial Catalogue, Frieze, Interview, CURA, and Kaleidoscope, as well as monographs published by MACK, Phaidon, and Rizzoli. Loup Sarion (b. 1987, Toulouse, France) studied at Beaux-Arts de Paris (2010-2015) and Cooper Union, New York (2013). Recent solo and duo exhibitions include: Saliva, Berthold Pott Gallery, Cologne; Cannibal Canyon, M+B, Los Angeles (w/ Daniel Boccato); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; Milch in meinen augen, Kunstverein Heppenheim, Germany; Tuff Titties, Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels (w/ Al Freeman); Chapo, Clearing, New York (w/ Harold Ancart); Everybody is somebody’s secret, Berthold Pott Gallery, Cologne; Smooth like an alibi, Formatocomodo, Madrid; Langue Pendue, SpazioA, Pistoia, Italy. Recent group exhibitions include: Carl Kostyál, Sweden; Galleria Continua, Les Moulins, France; Noire gallery, Torino, Italy; Espace 251 Nord, Liège, Belgium. He was artist-in-residence at International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York, in 2018. In 2021, he founded Marrow, an experimental design project with Rafael Prieto. Loup Sarion lives and works in New York.