THE SHAPE OF THINGS

Group Exhibition

July 22nd - September 3rd 2022

Swivel Saugerties’ second group exhibition The Shape of Things unites eleven conceptual and abstract artists manipulating ordinary and unexpected materials in extraordinary ways. Angela Conant, Donté Hayes, Ernesto Burgos, Kennedy Yanko, Kiah Celeste, Jens Kothe, Nick Theobald, Rose Nestler, Ryan Cosbert, Emmanuel Massillon and Walter Cruz represent a burgeoning fellowship of artists that are pushing the boundaries of materiality and form to contest status quo.

In the spirit of alchemy, the act of art-making transforms the material as much as it does the maker. This transformation involves reusing, cutting and pasting discarded and found items as well as joining, shifting and controlling natural elements to make objects of reckoning and contemplation. 

The diverse material palette includes sand, fabric, ceramic, metal, paint skins, charcoal, wood, resin, rope, glass, leather, machinery, foam and marble. The artists have spent significant time feeling and studying their mediums. As they learn its properties, they balance when to acquiesce and how to intervene. In turn, the works provoke the viewer to consider their own role and relationship to materials they encounter in their everyday living. 

Thus, the act of making becomes symbiotic. The artists push the realms of imagination as they create things that are imbued with spiritual and political charge. The resulting shapes of the sculptures, installations and mixed media paintings can be considered “thought forms,” or the visual representation of complex ideas. The subject matter is poignant and evocative and in turn addresses a wide range of issues.

The artists mine endless possibility from the evocative discards of man-made material and the study of decolonial history. Disillusionment with capitalism has propelled artists to increasingly incorporate detritus produced by our global economies. Like John Outterbridge, the genre-bending pioneer of the 1960s Californian assemblage movement, once said, “In castoffs there are profound treasures.”

For example, Burgos, Celeste, Conant and Yanko stage interventions with industrial materials. Yanko’s bunching and drapery indicate motion, the overall form taking the shape of upward flight. Celeste articulates the passage of time by impressing found forklift wheels on sand. Nestler and Kosthe’s anthropomorphic assemblages sashay into the soft, alluding to cellular and biological forms and the relationship of specific materials like fabric and leather to the human body.