Getting settled into Kim?’s three exhibition rooms, Indri\u0137is \u0122elzis’, Adam Cruces’ and Louisa Gagliardi’ solo presentations begin a dialogue, they mutually “magnetize” and overlap, creating a gradual shi\ufb05 from digital \ufb01gurative painting to abstraction. As part of the exhibition Tastes Like Headaches, Gagliardi’s work focuses on scenes of daily rest, referring to those portrayed historically and currently; Cruces inquisitively observes aspects such as domestic economics, information bubbles and art historical trends; while \u0122elzis’ abstracted metal frames – headless characters re\ufb02ect on the mind’s independent structure or reality – some programmed operation, which resulted in a mechanical or casual scene.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n<\/span>3<\/p>\n \u201cFragile reverie bleaches the real and paints over it, washed out, without depth, in thin, contiguous layers, a somnolent world into which the dreamer sinks and is lost,\u201d wrote Jean-Luc Nancy about the dream, the \u201c\ufb01ne thread\u201d of which \u201centraps in the way a spider holds prisoner the antennae of an insect caught in its web.\u201d Upon waking you lack edges, as you did in dreams. Were you caught in silk the same way? You wished for landscapes but were short-sighted (or delimited by some non-ontogenical actor). Each meal illuminated by a scrying candle, you wish yourself less porous, because entry and exitways required management, and your work life was overwhelming enough. Your failures named you Pierrot, so you tighten your ruff.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/span>4<\/p>\n A second rider enters your car and chooses the passenger seat. They connect their phone to the car stereo, invoking some fungible barrage of downtempo synths, as if to say, \u201ceven my ipseity has a sonic quality to it.\u201d You understand this desire as always already occurring, though it sublimates di\ufb00erently depending on the month or year or sales quotas. Too much time had passed for a lapsarian question to remain. To avoid introspection, you turn your head and \ufb01xate on the Paci\ufb01c, knowing that the silk-bearing spider wishes it were the pelagic Halobates. A\ufb05er all, the Halobates is more altruistic, able to be collected by researchers to serve as testing subjects for oceanic metal pollution. Access to such a vast body\u2013\u2013what bliss\u2013\u2013to uncover the lie of every Pret a Manger and have each area of Earth as one\u2019s home, to become the terminal cartographer. Instead she is stuck with leaves.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/span>5<\/p>\n Later you \ufb01nd you\u2019ve accumulated foreign metals in your blood, much like the Halobates. Your last chemistry panel in August measured potassium, carbon dioxide, glucose, creatinine and the anion gap, which you tried to calculate yourself using this formula:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n[Na+] – [Cl-] – [HCO3-]\n <\/p>\n Quick attempts at mathematics helped alleviate your consistent brain fog, but now you were reduced to only your garments: bronze frames, 95% cotton denim, dyed lamb\u2019s wool. Wool made you feel like the spider. Your enemies had resigned themselves to geophasia.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I thought this ability to morph bene\ufb01cial to my job prospects?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Returning to the scrying candle you \ufb01nd its wax depleted. You return to your resting place in the stage of the amphitheater and capitulate to anonymous limbs under spotlights.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tastes Like Headaches acknowledges contemporary lifestyle as an assemblage of rickety, fraught conditions and symptoms that are simultaneously viewed and maintained as solutions. Collaborative works by Adam Cruces and Louisa Gagliardi show obscured faces in lightless backgrounds; Cruces\u2019 acrylic painting over Gagliardi\u2019s digital works printed on PVC vinyl present physical interventions over a subject that has succumbed to the blurry, furtive nature of a machinic sociability and economy. Additionally, Cruces\u2019 exhibits works made from mesh, creating outlines made from popcorn. Sculptural works using Elizabethan-era ru\ufb00 make reference to aristocracy, classical painting and how bourgeois lifestyles are sublimated today through garments. Finally, video works by Cruces yield to quotidian situations in which subjects are resigned to adverse spatio-temporal conditions, using Uber and the spider\u2019s web as examples.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Indri\u0137is \u0122elzis\u2019 sculptures made with steel tubes are out\ufb01tted with anthropic symbols that interrogate the idea of direct, universal realism and re\ufb02exes amongst contemporary art objects. His works read as glyphs that are unable to be decoded using a conventional, inchoate lexicon of mere abstraction. Moreover, the sculptures\u2019 lack of a clear, conceptual telos is a rupturing of the claim that the object\u2019s a\ufb00ectability and creation always already contain a narrative substructure that easily a\ufb00ord understanding.<\/p>\n Text by Kyle Thomas Hinton. A writer and researcher based in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Louisa Gagliardi<\/span> was born in 1989 in Sion, Switzerland. She received her BFA in Graphic Design from ECAL in 2012. Gagliardi\u2019s practice revolves around illustration, which allows her projects to oscillate between the editorial realm and visual arts realm. Since 2015 she has been focusing on her painting practice. Gagliardi has recently exhibited at LUMA Foundation, Zurich, CH; Tomorrow Gallery, NYC, USA; K\u00f6nig Galerie, Berlin, DE; Istituto Svizzero, Roma, IT and Helmhaus, Zurich, CH. Gagliardi currently lives and works in Zurich, CH.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Adam Cruces<\/span> is an artist who was born in 1985 (Houston, TX, USA), currently living in Zurich, CH. He received his BFA from Kansas City Art Institute in 2008, and his MFA from Z\u00fcrcher Hochschule der K\u00fcnste in 2013. Within his personal practice, Cruces produces site-speci\ufb01c installations interested in the balance of obligation and recreation, in association with contemporary lifestyles. These are o\ufb05en addressed as contextual factors, in which the work is physically experienced, as well as conceptual factors in relation to spatio-temporal utilization. His work has recently been exhibited at Helmhaus, Zurich, CH; Galleria d\u2019Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, IT; Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, DK; Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris, FR; Kunsthaus Langenthal, Langenthal, CH; and Berlin Biennale 9\u2019s Fear of Content.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Indri\u0137is \u0122elzis<\/span> (1988) received his Masters degree from the Visual Communications department at the Art Academy of Latvia (2014) and graduated from the HISK (Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten) Higher Institute for Fine Arts, in Ghent, Belgium (2016). Recent solo-exhibitions: Two Unexpected Visitors, National Art Museum of Latvia exhibition hall Arsenal and Gallery Vartai, Vilnius, Lithuania (2015), Patiently Becoming a Sculpture, M\u0101kslai Vajag Telpu Summer House (2015); recent group exhibitions: The Empty Fox Hole, HISK, Ghent, San Serri\ufb00e Riga Art Space, Riga, In\ufb02ux, ERA VI VII VI, New York and others.<\/p>\n Getting settled into Kim?’s three exhibition rooms, Indri\u0137is \u0122elzis’, Adam Cruces’ and Louisa Gagliardi’ solo presentations begin a dialogue, they mutually “magnetize” and overlap, creating a gradual shi\ufb05 from digital \ufb01gurative painting to abstraction. As part of the exhibition Tastes Like Headaches, Gagliardi’s work focuses on scenes of daily rest, referring to those portrayed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2017-exhibitions","category-kim-exhibitions","category-past-exhibitions"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n