curated by Sarah Johanna Theurer Event

Sarah Johanna Theurer
Curator

Artists
Robert Breer, Neïla Czermak Ichti, Rhea Fowler & Michaela Tobin

Tricksters

What is under the carpet is not visible. When something is swept under the carpet it may not attract attention and is not mutable. Pulling the rug out from someone’s feet, metaphorically unsettling someone’s belief and material existence, is a classical slapstick trick. How many hours have you spent watching or playing cartoon characters getting their heads flattened by frying pans and bodies smashed into accordions? Slapstick slyness is the trickster’s weapon of choice, neither villain nor hero but both, one and the other. Removing the rug might open a trap door into the grainy duplicity of what we call common reality. Robert Breer’s rug sculpture hovers through the gallery. The ‘Floats’ are like nodes that mark the convergence of multiple trains of thought. Made of painted styrofoam, neutral in color and shape, the motorized objects move slowly, animated like buoys in the sea. With great tranquility, they seem to follow random paths, introducing a kinetic energy that proliferates the possible points of view of the very moment. And then, they casually drift out of the picture. Operatic vocals slashing through drony electronic noise recall ancient dramas, existential ambiguities that can never be fully resolved. Micalea Tobin’s voice condenses on the glass ceiling and runs down the gallery walls. The four-channel sound installation, commissioned for this exhibition and produced together with Rhea Fowler could be an homage to the trickster, a folklore figure native to many pre-colonial mythologies. Neïla Czermak Ichti’s witty observations draw latent meanings to the surface. The precise but casual ballpoint drawings on cropped paper open up multiple frames of reference to everyday moments of life. Drawn from her personal archive—photos of her family combined with stills from early mafia films and screenshots from horror movies—Ichti’s characters transmit the tempers and tunes of the weird. Sporting Sonic, Caspar, or Alien on their T-shirts, they invite us to redefine our certainties about the unreal and remind us that meanings never stand still. They move, volatile like a voice or like the rug beneath your feet.