“PREY TO SOME BEAST”

Iva Lulashi & Christine Rebhuhn

October 14th - November 11th 2023

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present Prey To Some Beast, a two person exhibition featuring Christine Rebhuhn’s shrewd, sharp sculptural assemblages and Iva Lulashi’s intimate, intuitive paintings, bringing together artists of dierent mediums and global derivations, who’s similarities play out in their revelatory yet contradictory sentiments and nods at our arrangement of life, one that uctuates from warm and tender, to brutal, cold, and dominating. Both artists induce their creations with a level of suspense, one of vulnerability and vigilance, employing an eerie sensibility that puzzles the viewer and echoes the disposition of Jenny Holzer’s famous quote from her Living Series, “Some days you wake and immediately start to worry. Nothing in particular is wrong, it’s just the suspicion that forces are aligning quietly and there will be trouble.” Lulashi and Rebuhn oer the viewer a complex, contemplative moment in their suggestive dialogues, one that proers us to create our own assumptions and in turn, question our societal motives.

The interactions resembling predator-prey dynamics among humans are not rooted in biology: they are products of contemporary creation. From economic to sexual exploitation, modern-day methods of targeting the vulnerable are more insidious and complex than they are in nature. Lulashi’s paintings thread between layers of consciousness to draw out the instinctive drives behind the images of mass-commercialization related to the female body, focusing on carnal points of contact. She positions the viewer as voyeur, having stumbled into someone’s private room or peered into a clearing where gures emerge from the void like scenes from the Old Testament. The exposed subjects, lifted from still images of pornography and propaganda initially appear as trembling, faceless objects.

Imbued in the exhibition is a stoic desperation, where the artists extract the subtle, structural violences of the current day, alongside history itself. Rather than dispersing them, they subject these convolutions to negotiation in an absurd partnership, working with inherent tension as their material. The works emerge in a liminal space, where modulation between the contrasting roles becomes possible, where our surveillance inverts and we become surveilled. The trap is also a shelter: the site of protection is also the site of potential violence, as seen in Lulashi’s Di Cosa Ti Nutri? (What Do You Eat?), where two women are protruding out of a perplexing, man-made hole opposite an ominous male gure approaching down an alleyway, and Rebhuhn’s To Cherish, a massive, daunting snare laced with ceramic lilies containing a photograph of a hunting dog who has seemingly just retrieved the bounty.

Rebhuhn’s sculptures hold an elegiac quality, confronting the viewer with mundane structures in all their starkness. Industrial rods, decommissioned, distorted instruments, and chrome surfaces carry the visual connotations of power, while their shiny, polished nishes mirror the viewer and leave them with only silence. Made harmless in their stillness, taxidermied songbirds and fragile vines take up residence within their frozen clutches, and with this improbable and awkward harmony reached, Rebhuhn deftly laces each work with idioms that are often equal parts humorous and morose. The exhibition title in fact, originates from a recent work of Rebhuhn’s, serving as a double entendre. The word Prey is utilized on one hand as a victim stance, yet also akin to an oering to a god, which typically is therein, a beast of its own nature.

The commonalities between the artists from two dierent, but intertwining perspectives are therefore in need of context, and their sources. The backgrounds of both artists born into the late eighties, one of an Albanian refugee escaping communism after the fall of the regime in 1991, amidst the economic collapse and social unrest, and the other witnessing the slow, silent crumbling of Midwestern America, where crises of industry, morality, and faith have shuttered over the last decades. It is worthy to acknowledge the state of desperation can be and is a prerequisite for exploitation, and that restraint is often right next to recklessness. There is a way to nd freedom and chance within a landscape of control, assessing natural mechanisms of adaptation, and inventing unique inversions that blur boundaries, overturn expectations, and conate our physical reality with mysterious possibilities.

Christine Rebhuhn (b. 1989 in Mount Vernon, Iowa) is a Queens based sculptor. She received an MFA in ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2015. She has had solo exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg Gallery in New York, NY, NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, NY, Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis, and at Makeshift in Kalamazoo, MI. Her work has been included in group shows at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY, the Boiler in Brooklyn, NY and at Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN and NADA New York with Swivel Gallery. She also exhibited at the 2015 Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennale in Incheon, Korea. Residencies include: Vermont Studio Center (VT), Elsewhere (NC), NARS Foundation (NY), and Makeshift (MI). Her work was published in ArtMaze Magazine, Maake Magazine, and Artspace Magazine.

Iva Lulashi (b. 1988, Tirana, Albania) lives and works in Milan. In 2016, she graduated from the Fine Art Academy of Venice. Her artistic work stems from still photographs and frames that reflect the visual language of Albanian history, which has not consciously been lived, and that are combined with erotic clips, thus blurring the boundaries between the alembics of the propaganda in the films, sex scenes, and healthy outdoor activities. Among her solo exhibitions are Where I end and you begin at Prometeo Gallery (2023), Passione cola, passione scorre at Prometeo Gallery (2021), Vicino e altrove, a double solo exhibition with Regina José Galindo at Prometeo Gallery (2020), Love as a Glass of Water at Salzburger Kunstverein (2018), Eroticommunism at Prometeo Gallery, Frames at Villa Rondinelli (2017), and Where I feel there I am at TRART (2016).