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Join us in celebrating Gallery 44's summer exhibitions opening in all four galleries!
In the Main Gallery, A Smile Split by the Stars is a collaborative narration of nourbeSe philip’s poem, “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones.” Working within, across and beyond colonial lexicons, the installation reads philip’s poem through, and as, different audio-visual-textual moments of revolutionary intent, wherein black girlhood and black femininity are, a priori, re-coding the aesthetic promises of modernity.
In the Vitrines, flickering somewhere between figure and ground, Many Atmospheres Deeper probes the limits of visibility through global infrastructures of finance and resource extraction. The emerging frontiers of critical minerals are landscapes generated through remote sensing and market forecasts, artificial intelligence and digital twin simulations. That is, they demand supply chains not only of mines, ports and human workers, but also logistical networks of images, instruments and corporate lobbyists. Returning to the concept of the “abyss” to consider the vast unknowns that make a world known, Scheinman suggests a new paradigm of exalted encounter with three spatial imaginaries—the desert, the ocean and the swamp—that in this critical moment of energy transition are increasingly, or perhaps once again, coming into view.
In the Members' Gallery, Captured during artist Ella Morton’s 2024 residency at La Wayaka Current in the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile and subsequent travels in Rapa Nui (Easter Island), this body of work experiments with a range of analogue processes, including mordançage on 4x5 colour negatives, film soup techniques and the use of decades-old expired films. Conjuring psychedelic dreamscapes with these processes—Morton examines the deep connection to the sky, the stars and the numinous palpable in these locations—excavating the latent possibilities within emulsion to manifest the energies present within these remote and volatile landscapes.
In the Production Gallery, Prolonged: Translating a Distance examines the fluidity of memory through abstraction, exploring and offering an alternate way to consider stories of displacement. Yuhan Zheng's images transferred onto bamboo, blur and partially tear away, disrupting the linearity of memory to reveal its fragmentary, intimate and abstract qualities. Zheng’s quiet visuals resist narrating memory, opting to explore its disjointedness through the coexistence of absence and presence and how their connection is preserved and reimagined across time and space.
Thank you to our reception sponsor:
