PATHWAYS
ALESSANDRA ACIERNO, LAURA BERGER, NICKI CHERRY,
STEPHANIE LUCCHESE, MASHA MORGUNOVA, PAULA QUERIDO
November 21 – December 19, 2024
Do not mistake aloofness for airiness, else all breathing should escape the body. Too easy to confuse on account of its proneness to evanesce which some regard akin to forgetting. She doesn’t capitulate to any of this, knowing all the rest has merely been a bundle of niceties. There are more important things to reason with. Reason, now there’s a funny thought, what good is reason for groping around the dark? Therapists have a rather annoying habit of being right or making the totally obvious sound illuminating. Switch on a light, they say, as if it’s so easy to be in an empty room naked with your feelings. Your hands find each other; one of them swivels the ring on your finger that you bought for yourself. Noting that it’s looser that day than any of the others before it you realise it’s autumn, maybe winter, it’s getting cold. A memory from around this time last year enters and passes through the body, a material thing, with heft and girth. Piles of leaves do better, scattered by hasty passersby that scowl if the streets do not immediately clear for them. The streets look flustered, something about pathetic fallacy and a sensation. Maybe joint pain. Maybe broken porcelain. Arrangements in white are not just for wedding table settings. I won’t make it tonight, especially after having done a hatchet job with my alibi. You, and others, painfully self-evident incompatibilities. Colourless functions of time and space. We had to tell her, really. And in the end, it didn’t work out. What didn’t? The mowing of grass and your lilting pleas and stumbling around the freeway’s left flank into soft verges. You ask me with whom I am commiserating tonight, and I say with myself. Others have predilections like a tendency to the superlative, mine is a maladapted realism, fleshly pleasure and the all-too-frequent numbing of it under the pretence of communing. I think this as I walk brusquely past people charged with the pains of hanging on to their possessions. And the leaves scatter. I know I’m not one of them, I lose everything from scarves to a means of forgiving, things that don’t even belong to me. Because everything slips away eventually, even the soul from the body, ask the hole dug like a newborn’s cradle. Ask it, it won’t be as witty nor as morose as the epitaph that will be written by somebody close who completely misunderstood you. A hand in a too-big glove. All this cannot cater to the expense of living and then there’s that awkward you-shaped hole left for others to experience only in negativity and, either never speak of again, or talk about incessantly to their therapist with pathos. Others study you for impending disaster. There is no disaster, only superimpositions of scale, determining factors, ways of reading how and when fortune can be expected. A bluer sky than yesterday’s, the stepfather that is more sympathetic than he was before, and who you thought might never grow to love you and trust me, he won’t. But that’s inertia, the inability to stop it or to help it. Falling over yourself still has a forward trajectory though. Nothing ostentatious or with life warranty, only the body on temporary loan. Leveraging the family insurance policy and then feeling defeatist about the financialization of life, as it were. Only atrophied spirit takes the form of a punctured birthday balloon, the very one her stepfather paid the extra dollar for, it was clear and held a sad bit of plastic confetti, kind of sparkly. It’s a gesture. Splintered light and wrung shadows, and we’re back to the light switch again. Her only mistake is that she wished too hard for the lightest of impressions to leave an indelible mark, for hunger to feel see-through and need to feel like less like solipsism. Heartbreak or fiction, she stows it away. She no longer questions why asymmetries produce a suite of emotions that cause the internal organs to hurt.
A prose-poem by Elaine M.L. Tam
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Alessandra Acierno (b. 1994, Charleston, South Carolina) is a contemporary artist living and working in Israel. Her work is about the hues and hollows of loneliness, and often focuses on the presence of ambiguity and absurdity within human interactions. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016 and her Master of Fine Arts at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Laura Berger (b. 1979, USA) is a contemporary artist living and working in Chicago. Centered around themes of interdependence and self-understanding, her images focus on figurative archetypes, intuitive color palettes and dreamlike minimalistic environments. Initially approaching painting as a therapeutic practice, her work serves as a means through which to explore and articulate experiences and memories that feel just out of reach, that exist on a more spiritual or emotional plane.
Nicki Cherry (b. 1992, Lafayette, Indiana) is an artist based in New York. Cherry’s monstrous fiberglass and concrete sculptures incorporate active systems of growth and decay—tulips bloom from stretching tendrils, ceramic bodies leak milky fluids, spine-shaped candles burn and diffuse scent. Their work embraces the awkward and absurd to explore the frequent discomfort that comes with being a body.
Stephanie Lucchese (b. 1991, São Paulo, Brazil) is a contemporary artist living and working in New York. She works primarily on painting and drawing, creating fictions and a personal mythology in scenes that allow a peek into an invented universe where forms, fruits, plants and figures interact in constant movement, devouring themselves as time remains still.
Masha Morgunova (b. 1998) is a multimedia artist based in New York City. Her recent work centers around impermanence and humans’ relationship to eternity revealed through contemplation and interaction with landscape and nature more broadly.
Paula Querido(b. 1992, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil)
is a contemporary artist living and working in New York. Her work evoke a powerful sense of nostalgia, memory, storytelling, fiction, and reality, exploring the position of the human figure within place and time.
Alessandra Acierno (b. 1994, Charleston, South Carolina) is a contemporary artist living and working in Israel. Her work is about the hues and hollows of loneliness, and often focuses on the presence of ambiguity and absurdity within human interactions. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016 and her Master of Fine Arts at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Laura Berger (b. 1979, USA) is a contemporary artist living and working in Chicago. Centered around themes of interdependence and self-understanding, her images focus on figurative archetypes, intuitive color palettes and dreamlike minimalistic environments. Initially approaching painting as a therapeutic practice, her work serves as a means through which to explore and articulate experiences and memories that feel just out of reach, that exist on a more spiritual or emotional plane.
Nicki Cherry (b. 1992, Lafayette, Indiana) is an artist based in New York. Cherry’s monstrous fiberglass and concrete sculptures incorporate active systems of growth and decay—tulips bloom from stretching tendrils, ceramic bodies leak milky fluids, spine-shaped candles burn and diffuse scent. Their work embraces the awkward and absurd to explore the frequent discomfort that comes with being a body.
Stephanie Lucchese (b. 1991, São Paulo, Brazil) is a contemporary artist living and working in New York. She works primarily on painting and drawing, creating fictions and a personal mythology in scenes that allow a peek into an invented universe where forms, fruits, plants and figures interact in constant movement, devouring themselves as time remains still.
Masha Morgunova (b. 1998) is a multimedia artist based in New York City. Her recent work centers around impermanence and humans’ relationship to eternity revealed through contemplation and interaction with landscape and nature more broadly.
Paula Querido(b. 1992, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil)
is a contemporary artist living and working in New York. Her work evoke a powerful sense of nostalgia, memory, storytelling, fiction, and reality, exploring the position of the human figure within place and time.