“SUBJECT TO CHANGE”

Featuring Abigail Lucien, Nickola Pottinger, Tami Soji-Akinyemi

August 30th - October 7th 2023

Swivel Gallery is delighted to present "Subject to Change," a three-person exhibition showcasing the works of Abigail Lucien, Nickola Pottinger, and Tami Soji-Akinyemi. Embracing the forces of flux and fragmentation, each artist brings their three-dimensional work to life through energetic improvisation. Their labor-intensive processes involve reimagining fractured pasts and incomplete stories, resulting in speculative rearrangements that blend diametric elements. Here, hybridity finds strength in unpredictability: change is not only the subject matter, but also the process through which these artists readily express their visions.

In crafting their composite metallic constructions, Abigail Lucien creates a third-culture landscape where contradictions seamlessly mesh. Their sculptures subvert commonplace architectural features as a means of challenging systems of assimilation, either contorting the familiar into the realm of the foreign or vice versa. These mismatched objects–at once sturdy and delicate, functional and ornamental–traverse conventional notions of home, connected by virtue of their shared displacement.

In Nickola Pottinger’s restlessly imaginative world, destruction and dispersion do not lead to hard resolution. Instead they signify a generative cycle: her handmade wall reliefs embrace detritus as a malleable resource. With melded layers of found materials, the objects retain an abundance of irregular surfaces and indiscernible identities. Infused with bright color, and with every mark of making preserved in texture, they appear restless and alive. Pottinger thus challenges the status of artifacts as static, lost objects by reconfiguring them as fluid material–a process that imbues them with a sense of both belonging and animation.

Tami Soji-Akinyemi’s textile assemblages are driven by a fascination with subjective truth. Her process endeavors to make the fabric of everyday life visible by tearing against it. The artist positions herself as both the builder and the destroyer, or caught somewhere between the two by enacting analogical “truth telling.” Pocked with holes, these ruined linen surfaces offer forensic evidence of incomplete and unstable narratives; wherein text becomes an abstracted series of punctures that are open-ended, double-sided, or hollow. Making use of the material world to invert our understanding of the “real,” Soji-Akinyemi’s surface perforations also become points of access, integral to her process of finding a makeshift refuge.

Throughout their protean body of work, these three artists invite viewers to reflect on transitory phases of life and the perpetual state of evolution that shapes making. Disregarding conventional codes of object production, they demonstrate how new forms emerge under the pressures of societal, political, and personal change. “Subject to Change” thus presents an alternative archaeology, in which Lucien, Pottinger, and Soji-Akinyemi excavate materials and divine new meanings. Together, they re-assemble a future of cultural multiplicity, forging seemingly disparate parts into a home.

Abigail Lucien (b.1992, Dallas, TX) is a Haitian-American interdisciplinary artist currently based in Baltimore, MD, where they teach sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Working in sculpture, literature, and time-based media, Lucien’s practice addresses themes of (be)longing, futurity, myth, and place by considering our relationship to inherited colonial structures and systems of belief/care. Lucien was named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, is a recipient of a 2021 VMFA Fellowship and the 2020 Harpo Emerging Artist Fellow. Past exhibitions include SculptureCenter (NY), MoMA PS1 (NY), MAC Panamá (Panamá), Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), UICA (Grand Rapids, MI), and The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA).

Nickola Pottinger (b. 1986, Kingston, Jamaica) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and earned her BFA from The Cooper Union. Pottinger's striking sculptures result from an intuitive process that the artist developed involving paper pulp, collage, pigments and embedded found objects, including from her block in Brooklyn. Described as wall reliefs, they are quizzical, irregular, vaguely ritual, and seem on the verge of motion - a kinetic charge that conveys, if abstractly, the Jamaican-born artist's dance background and interest in the body. Recent exhibitions include Chapter NY, Sergeant's Daughters, and the New Museum Triennial, New York; Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris; and the Galveston Artist Residency, Texas. Previous solo exhibitions include Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, Deanna Evans Projects, New York, NY, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA and The Armory Show, New York, NY, which was reviewed by the New York Times. The artist will have her first solo exhibition with Mrs. in January, 2024.

Tami Soji-Akinyemi (b. 1991, London, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in London. Her practice explores ‘leading’ images that hint towards visual clarity rather than revealing images all at once. Soji- Akinyemi works between painting, printmaking and sculpture, exploring the exposure, reflections, and propagation of micro and macro forms of ‘propaganda’ which she defines more extensively than the political context as ‘agenda driven communication’. Her current works explore duality in the emergence of light and its association with knowing. Following a BA in Fashion Design from University of Creative Arts, Epsom (2014), she graduated from MA Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2022.