OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR

Featuring Chris Bradley, Kiah Celeste, Paloma Izquierdo, Carly Mandel, Eric Oglander, Christine Rebhuhn, Irgin Sena, Marek Wolfryd

March 30th - April 27th 2024

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present, “Objects In The Mirror”, a group exhibition bringing together eight artists working with, and transforming the confines of things we encounter in the everyday. Each artist brings new definitions to how we view objects we encounter in our daily lives through manipulation, form, and their concepts. The artists presented work inside and outside of traditional mediums of painting and sculpture, and instead employ their imagination, or rather reimagination in place of and often over aesthetics.

Mirrors on the outside of the passenger side of cars often contain a message that says something like, "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear." In other words, the image seen in the mirror, although looking like the objects in other respects, appear to be further away than they actually are, because of its convex lens. This has always been intriguing in the aspect of making sense of a world that is riddled with twists and turns, a world that is oftentimes illogical. The artists in this exhibition look to that world and mutate it in ways that likewise change the way that we think about it, our surroundings, and the things we accrue throughout it.

Chris Bradley’s “Fire Extinguisher” and “AED”, are both safety devices holding within them features that are contrary to their existence, armed with deterrents and the option to do something dissolute, as he mixes into their being elements of danger and destruction. Carly Mandel and Paloma Izquierdo both touch on fragility, not only present in the work itself, but in our systems. While Mandel presents oversize medical bracelets, commenting on the commodification of the healthcare system, by re-representing these enlarged objects, she illustrates we cannot thrive independent of the object’s consumption. Izquierdo delves in objects used to regulate access and analyze how infrastructures can be intervened or subverted, reimagining everyday structures with transformed functions. Often made with glass she comments on the fact that our institutions are often built on lies, and can easily break due to their faulty foundations. Kiah Celeste and Eric Oglander share a kindred reusing of found materials, dissecting them and finding them a new poetic lifeline, as seen in Celeste’s “A Case Of The Mondays”, where she insets discarded vacuum tubes into office cubicle caps, while Oglander’s flat works repurpose vintage style dress shirts over wood panels with optical illusion to create minimal, dizzying works that speak to the art of painting.

Marek Wolfryd and Christine Rebhuhn both in this exhibition present works of hard steel that strangely correlate with each other, although hailing from different respective backgrounds. Wolfryd mines history and art history to find correlations to society through global trade and migration, earmarked by his witty work “Reflection Of A Setting Star On The Surface Of A River”, a mixture of an Anish Kapoor riff and on the same note referencing the “discada”, a pan whose origins are often attributed to the camaraderie between Mexican and Chinese rail workers in the early 20th century. Irgin Sena’s work explores the ephemerality of the representational structures and systems that our need to project significance and narrative coherence onto widely disparate signs. His a-typical wall and floor sculptures hold a balance of cultural references of social, political and literary narratives, a mashup of techniques and imagery that the brain when activated finds logic in.

Art, in its most essential sense has a way of altering our human existence, it does so always for the betterment of our world. This exhibition is meant to serve as a reminder that things are not always as they seem, and that things are always viewed from multitudes of perspectives, therefore illuminating our individuality and at once critiquing it.