Weho, Los Angeles
Group Exhibition
Sounds the Mouth Can’t Make
CaseVictoria Bartlett Rebecca Watson Horn Andros Zins-Browne Case Gallery is pleased to present Sounds the Mouth Can’t Make, a collaborative group exhibition. Over the course of several months, the artists worked together to create an entirely new, interdisciplinary collaboration. Sounds the Mouth Can’t Make weaves together the artists’ distinct practices—painting, performance, and sculpture—into a generative exploration of the unraveling of the internal self against external social boundaries. Sounds the Mouth Can’t Make is an untethered search into how language becomes a physical struggle to express the continuity of the conscious condition. The exhibition will officially commence with a performance by Zins-Browne and co-collaborator Ley as they weave the separate aspects of the show into a singular expression. The artists’ works interact through various disciplines within the gallery space, creating a joint, tactile exploration of the inabilities of language to convey and communicate across boundaries. Rebecca Watson Horn’s paintings have taken on a new medium with Semaphores, a series of fluid works, swirling across long swaths of burlap. Speech is transmuted into suspended graphics more reminiscent of the human shape than alphabetical symbols. Horn’s works freely hang across the gallery, becoming woven grids of transparency and texture. This new series is presented alongside four works from Horn’s Sigils, stretched paintings that transform written language into object-like gestures. Interacting with Horn’s paintings, Andros Zins-Browne’s live performance, untitled vowels, creates a perpetual entanglement of distance, violence, and closeness. Commissioned by the gallery for the exhibition, untitled vowels blurs the lines between conversation and performance through a movement-based language system that uses embodied and vocal signaling to transmit messages across space. In an accompanying sound piece installed in the gallery, Zins-Browne and Ley expand on this choreographic evolution of language through a libretto composed of multiple texts, rewoven through harmonies and dissonances. Zins-Browne and Ley will wear Victoria Bartlett’s sculptural costume designs as they perform together. Enhancing the space between bodies in motion with transformative and fluid structures, Bartlett’s designs intend to give shape to Zins-Browne and Ley’s movements throughout the gallery space. Throughout the run of show, the wearable sculptures will remain on display on armatures, reacting to Horn’s Semaphores and Zins–Browne’s corresponding sound piece. Sounds the Mouth Can’t Make was curated by Michael Rashkow. Victoria Bartlett (b. 1962, Gloucester) is a multidisciplinary artist with over twenty years of creative and design direction experience. Bartlett was Fashion Editor/Director for Allure, Interview, and Big Magazine. She is also known for styling celebrities including Bjork, Courtney Love, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lawrence, Madonna, Rihanna, and Pharrell Williams. She’s consulted for an international roster of brands including Calvin Klein, Miu Miu, Moncler, and Versace. Bartlett founded two award-winning fashion brands, VPL and Never Before. She has collaborated with various artists, galleries, and museums as Creative Director on projects with Ugo Rondinone, MoMA, Kai Althoff, Maria Hassabi, The Royal Ballet, and New York City Ballet. Ley (b. 2021, Boston) is a multi-disciplinary, multi-directional Cross-dresser in pursuit of lysis. Rebecca Watson Horn (b. 1981, Boston) received a BFA from The Cooper Union, an MFA from Rutgers University, and attended The Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles. Forthcoming solo show will be presented at Galeria Marta Cervera (Madrid, 2024); Horn’s solo exhibitions include Sigils, Auroras (São Paulo, 2023); letters as such, Deli Gallery (New York, 2021); White Columns (New York, 2017) and Rub It In, Soloway (Brooklyn, 2011). She has participated in several group exhibitions including The Practice of Everyday Life, Derosia, New York; Forland, Catskill, NY; Pure Joy, 1969, New York (2022); Personal Effects, Rumpelstiltskin, Brooklyn (2020); spaceless, Deli Gallery, Brooklyn (2019); Zebra, La Kaje, Brooklyn; Flower Sermon, Yui Gallery, New York (2018); Objectified, Bromfield Gallery, Boston (2017); X, Lyles & King, New York (2016); Canaries, Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, and at Hotel Pupik, Scheifling, Austria (2015). Andros Zins-Browne (b. 1981, New York) works at the intersection of performance and dance, extending choreographic practice into engagements with dancers, nondancers, singers, objects, and texts. His work has been commissioned by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the 10th Berlin Biennale, Dia Art Foundation; Kadist, Paris; and presented at Performa 19 Biennial, ICA, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; Fondation Galeries Lafayette and Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Danspace Project, Triple Canopy, New York. He has created two remixes of the work of choreographer Simone Forti—See-Saw, MoMA, New York and Asymmetry 222, Getty Center, Los Angeles. With artist Karthik Pandian he created a series of videos Three Songs Without Z., currently on view on the Criterion Channel. He is the recipient of awards from the Goethe-Institut, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Community, and New York State Council on the Arts.