Photo story
Spiritual World, the title of the current group show at RAINRAIN, references Alfred Stieglitz’s Spiritual America, a 1923 photograph of a harnessed, castrated horse. The powerless restrained stallion—a traditional American symbol of unstoppable prowess—symbolized for Stieglitz the loss of spirituality in his contemporary American culture. The organizer of Spiritual World, Theodor Nymark, a Copenhagen-based artist who also shows work in it, brought together seven artists from Denmark, Korea, and the USA to explore how spirituality can exist today outside conservative religious ideals and ultra-liberal new-age paganism. In a text for the show, Nymark specifies further how he sees spirituality—”like a multifaceted metaphor, many-sided, a prism with no central outpost, only imagination. Not just a lake, a mirror. Not just a car, a vehicle.” These notions reflect the overall premise of this show.
In Shells of Probabilities (9#/13), Korean-born Kay Yoon creates a vertical sculpture that seamlessly merges automobile parts and two ritual bowls into a hybrid essence that evokes a mechanical seated figure or a deconstructed bust, without losing their rusty mechanical traits. The circles in the top ritual bowl spiral down into a prominent screw at the center, resembling at once a meat grinder, a sink plug, a Picassoesque eye, and sound waves (indeed, when you hit them, they emit a resonant sound with deep reverberation). It is not surprising to read in the artist’s biography that her overall practice involves performative elements emphasizing physical encounters, playfully integrating ceremonial functions, and cryptic gestures. You can practically hear the resounding sound waves without the performing hand.
Across the room, NYC-based artist Quay Quinn Wolf’s slim, wall sculpture titled _003, also intertwines the corporeal and the ritual, the functional and the spiritual. This minimalistic piece resembles a key chain with a stainless-steel dental impression tray hanging at the bottom. Five pieces of Pyrite—a mineral often referred to as “fool’s gold” and believed in various spiritual practices to be a powerful protective stone—are bound by steel wire to the oral care paraphernalia, evoking a sense of mischievous absurdity. Here, too, the spiritual is an unholy union between the body’s necessities and human aspirations for soulfulness.
The sense of dimensionality shifts from Yoon’s and Wolf’s 3-dimensional pieces to the 2-dimensional pieces by Copenhagen-based Amitai Romm. Although relatively flat, the use of intricate layering of assorted media and materials gives a sense of a tangible process. In Untitled, an RFID chip on copper is juxtaposed with found archival documents depicting scribbles, images of mice, a figure in what appears to be a white lab coat, eye balls, and busy hands, all taken from the artist’s previous artwork. The architectural layout resonates a world within a world of images, a lab maze where our memories and actions all reside, perhaps.
In Messenger00013, an enigmatic ghost figure surfaces under protruding pinkish wax dots, reminding us through quite different tactile aesthetics how inkjet print fuses with the archaic. The spiritual in Romm’s works dwells in an abstracted Ballardian world, where past and present merge into a continuous sense of “being.”
Like the previous works, Los Angeles-based Lara Joy Evans’ photographs integrate industrial/technological elements—photographs, the epitome of 19th-century technological breakthrough, are encased in thick hand-molded resin with off-white and brownish-yellow hues. The pairing of these two seemingly contrasting images is particularly resonant in the context of this show—Communication Relic No. 03 depicts two large satellite dishes gazing upwards toward a dark sky, and Fat and Mud portrays a blob of mud hovering in the air and creating splash rings in a primordial pool of slush, resonating with formation of life out of mud, a recurrent narrative across cultures and religions—celestial and earthy synergize.
Next to Evans’ duo, Theodor Nymark presents an evocative monochromatic photogravure. It depicts an inversed photograph of a scaled model of Edison’s Pearl Street Station model, a pioneering power plant that opened in 1882 in New York City and marked a significant milestone in the history of electricity and urban development. It can read as a multi-layered homage to our technological forefathers, without whom our world would not have the same illumination—technological and spiritual.
If you take a close look at the image above, you can spot a reflection of Danish artist Lea Porsager’s Moooooooo (fake cow) text at the far right. The text should represent itself as a form, rhythm, and sound. Porsager, a well-known artist in Denmark, interweaves fabulation and speculation with various mediums, including film, sculpture, photography, and, as we see here— text.
The Khmer/Khmae (Cambodian) Connecticut-based artist Joe Bun Keo portrays his beloved late uncle through a pair of black canvas slip-on-shoes outside, by the gallery door. Inside, his uncle’s calligraphy, and a memorial prayer card from the funeral are casually attached to the wall by pushpins. This reflects the artist’s fascination with personal objects that recreate biographical memories and traumatic experiences. Spirituality here is rooted in the things we leave behind.
The artworks in Spiritual World prompt us to approach spirituality not as a rigid set of moral codes, but in Nymark’s words, as a “state of experience and sensation through which we perceive our surroundings… like a child, a dog or a freed and eruptive stallion.”
All photos courtesy of Etty Yaniv unless otherwise indicated.
Spiritual World at RAINRAIN @rainrain July 19 – August 9, 2024 110 Lafayette St, Suite 201, New York, NY 10013