“If Not a Note, a Chasm” Exhibition

If Not a Note, a Chasm is a study on lost narratives and supposed wasted energies. Within certain larger systems that are designed to inspire futility or exhaustion, hope often feels naive, indulgent, or is held as a special secret—as both a luxury and a deep necessity. The exhibition brings together practices that look at systems working as a powerful tide to exhaust us. Many of the artists instead perpetuate highly personal ways of redirecting or tapping into pre-existing structures of knowledge and energy. Featuring large-scale installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, painting, audio, and mixed-media works by Serdar Arat, Jesus Benavente, Sarah Crofts, Margaret Inga Urías, Steven Pestana, Jennifer Tazewell Mawby, and Kris Waymire.

Fluttering light in Sarah Crofts’ lumen prints allows for glimpses through construction barrier windows, and into reconstructed family archives of a lost home. Kris Waymire’s mixed-media sculptures and laborious beading preserve their native Andean language and wider indigenous histories amid erasure and generational loss. Serdar Arat’s installation and dimensional paintings track the visual language of grandiose authority, from sirens and black holes to utopian architecture. Jesus Benavente’s work pinches the skin of compliancy, shifting between the informal and formal, to position the viewer in the uneasy seat of self-examination. Steven Pestana’s glinting sculptures make the claim that states of ambiguity are in actuality safe zones, ideal for rest, trust, and open inquiry. Jennifer Tazewell Mawby’s audio installation initiates a dizzyingly futile exercise of retracing one’s mental steps, to remember that which may be too far lost. Margaret Inga Urías’ work delicately surveys the all-encompassing layers of time and history that are held within the material of dust.

Whose broken window is a cry of art
(success, that winks aware
as elegance, as a treasonable faith)
is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première.
Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.
Our barbarous and metal little man.

“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
If not an overture, a desecration.”

—Boy Breaking Glass by Gwendolyn Brooks

The exhibition features a sound work by Travis Basso that accompanies the Departing Skies and Fallen installation by Serdar Arat. The original composition is Basso’s dynamic response to the impression left by the installation. Inspired by the sculptures’ skyward reach, as if engaged in a collective ritual, the sonic composition seeks to capture the essence of their world: the sounds, the emotions, and the unspoken rituals. Through the manipulation and weaving of sounds recorded from the sculptures themselves – embracing chance and controlled chaos – this composition offers an inorganic voice to the sculptures and their enigmatic realm.

These spaces are generously provided by: MAPSpace and Ravikoff Property Management