May 2025

Speculative Curatorial Project 

 

​​​​Dialogues, a speculative exhibition of work spanning from 1922-2024, tracks formal, and aesthetic interactions between material across temporal, geographic, and spatial bounds. Dialogues notes the uncanny connections created from contemporary and historical interaction with a guiding inquiry into post-war, Soviet controlled Eastern blocs and their avant-garde artists. 

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Lebanese-American painter Tasneem Sarkez’s Chessboard, 2022 is made odd in conversation with Avant-garde Slovakian Ladislav Guderna's Pink Still Life, 1973. A game board, on which games are typically played flat, is oriented upright on painting's rectilinear plane. A table, a structure to eat, read, and play on, becomes a voyeuristic plinth; a support. The former's position, and the latter's structure, are formal articulations discussed by Sarah Ahmed in her writings on queer phenomenology and philosophical thought production. Ahmed notes that the surfaces you write philosophy on, and what we think on, is shaped by orientation. 

 

Sarkez puzzles laser-etched Betty Boops while Guderna centers a sensuous form emerging from checkered patterns, then crudely realized in Alicia Adamerovich’s Paper Weight of 2021. Guderna and Sarkez's checkerboards crawl beneath Gertrude Abercrombie’s Jack Piece from 1950, citing objects used on top of flat game boards. These grids are then three-dimensionalized in Covey Gong’s steel structure titled TRD-RDDL01-HP, calling back to Russian constructivist miniature set design, as in Popova’s structure. Next to Anna Uddenberg’s Tanya from 2021, the speculative theater takes on anatomical forms, while Uddenberg’s synthetic woman becomes structural, utilitarian, and formal. Anne Imhof ironizes the classical bas relief, inserting slender and surrealist figures into bronze, complete with a scythe as a nod to Socialist Realism and the influences of Soviet labor in classical Eastern European postwar art. William Scott’s Mackerel on a Plate from 1951 epitomizes modernist perspective shifts in painting, a masculine counterpart to Guderna’s Pink Still Life, both forms supported and structured on tables. Scott’s drastic transition into abstraction the year after Mackerel on a Plate and titled The Harbour has been the subject of allegorical analysis; is the black, central form a phallic object or the space between two thighs? Louis Eisner’s Head (Lloyd Voidamort) from 2011 calls to the 20s Russian avant-garde's political and artistic theories on anticipating the stopping point of rapid mechanic progression, manifested in Malevich's black square. 

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Dialogues conceptual interconnectedness allows political and gendered meanings to emerge from aesthetic qualities, a narrative carved by continuously making the familiar not so.