Chinatown, New York
Group Exhibition
All Paradises
JDJPresented by S&T Quinn Bentley Juliusz Grabianski Anya Kashina Leon Pozniakow Tianyi Sun “All paradises are lost paradises” —Marcel Proust "It’s the end of August. The light is gold and heavy, skating across the ground, buoying the first fallen leaves along the pavement. Shadows languidly unfurl themselves, stretching their toes, and arching their backs through the streets. The landscape is soft and covered in peach fuzz. The last days of summer burn up in tender wisps of smoke. These downy days are clotted with nostalgia - for the summers remembered only by yellowed snapshots, the bright, waxy mornings of back to school, and the shiny new year." The 18th-century painters of the picturesque wove together contemporary landscape design with Greco-Roman figures and crumbling biblical hermitages, creating a vision of an eternal paradise. Painting en plein-air, Impressionists strove to capture a single instant,landscape was a thing in flux, an experience slowly escaping their grasp. Never neutral, place is inscribed with narrative and memory. The ridges and valleys of a landscape are only defined by our meandering, sentimental pilgrimages through them and through time. Quinn Benson, Juliusz Grabianski, Anya Kashina, Leon Pozniakow, and Tianyi Sun hurtle down these highways — picking up ephemera fallen along the road. Often, they run into virtual space, losing their way in the left-right-up swipes of an endlessly scrolling architecture. They wander through a carnivalesque metropolis, subsumed by its glowing proportions, each image dissipating as it passes. And yet, ‘memory’ is stored in blinking servers, fallible and opaque. Google Earth’s fish-eyed lens freezes 100/mile traffic whistling through the desert. These artists bring back logs of strange journeys into corn-fed conspiracies and the memorabilia of their own lives. Quinn Benson’s landscapes recall Stephen Shore’s images of the American West, but instead of the iconic low angle of the passenger-seat photographer he takes the view of Google Earth’s car-mounted camera. Google’s ‘360 Fleet’ drives all over the world, mainly capturing other cars and motorcycles speeding past. Benson’s paintings and prints create a library of these roadtrips, indexing snippets of journeys, for who knows where they might go. Juliusz Grabianski’s sculptures of a ‘future nostalgia’ draw on databases of crop-circle theorists and images of trance music from the early 2000s. Searching for formal similarities between cymatic shapes and crop circles, Grabianski tracks the inherent desire for patterns and universal connection to the hyper-local experience of the underground music scene and the physical crop circles of Wiltshire. Using glass and 3D printing, he makes the digital world physical — the rendering scraped and scabbed by its journey. Anya Kashina mines her own childhood memories and the evocative images of Margaret Atwood’s poetry and Slavic folklore to create the almost-images of her dry pastels and oil paintings. While no clear imagery emerges, they glimmer like the surface of slow moving water or softly whispering trees, suggesting a story told just out of ear shot. Kashina’s floating world is made up of light and air, gusting out of focus. Leon Pozniakow’s candy pink lozenges suspend scenes from films, details of classical paintings, and cartoon characters of his personal mythologies. Painted in cobalt violet, each of the Reliquaries of Aquarius is a point in his life’s constellation, superimposing the map of his past onto the world. Like medieval curios, they carry the weight of the saint’s body. Tianyi Sun’s resin canvases are printed with her memories, the fleeting images and haphazard selfies that make up our digital archives. Transparent and luminous, the images seem ghostly, as though not fully downloaded from an off-site server. Her new series of resin sculptures are cast from household fixtures and antique Chinese screens. Partitions designed to protect the privacy of a scholar’s work, Sun’s cloudy versions hold medicinal herbs and berries within them like amber fossils. The sense of a barely preserved archive pervades her work, capturing the liminal space between remembering and forgetting that the ‘cloud’ offers us.