Exhibition
Stephanie Temma Hier
Swallowing the Pit
Duration_ August 29–September 19, 2020
Opening_ Saturday, August 29, 2020, 6–8 PM
Opening_ Saturday, August 29, 2020, 6–8 PM
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Gallery Vacancy is delighted to present Swallowing the Pit, Stephanie Temma Hier's first solo exhibition in Shanghai from August 29 to September 19, 2020.
In her new body of sculptural paintings, Hier centers this exhibition in the circular transformation of earthly beings, drawing from the interconnectedness within the natural cycle of plant, food and animal systems, to the consumption and production of imageries that are contemporaneously modified and rendered from their biological beginnings. Sourcing her image references from ubiquitous scenes throughout art history, from vanitas of the Dutch Golden Age to internet stock imagery and pop cultural ephemera, she examines the depictions of the quotidian world with her paint-appropriated digital images and ceramic interventions, introducing a series of invented relationships and tensions that blurs the line between inside and outside, artificial and organic, ephemeral and eternal. Physically and metaphorically re-framing the painted subjects and objects with elaborate ceramic sculptures, Hier’s works suggests an orderless and anarchical space where conventional understandings of the established system may be rethought and reconfigured, creating a new context for found-images to be at once familiar yet disorienting. In Always on the sunnyside (2020), a cycle of cartoonish sunny-side-up fried eggs embraces a bed of flourishing white daisy as if sparrows causally resting on tree branches. Sharing visual similarities in color and form, the daisy flowerbed in its natural state symbolizes the cycle of eco-system without interferences, while the fried eggs implies the unseen presence of human intrusion, being the product of animal husbandry. In Clasped by light (2020), the cartoon reference of squirrel sculptures from Bugs Bunny and Snow White sets as a part of the endless stream of imagery which has been transmuted digitally and then appropriated in the context of Hier’s work, while its opalescent texture corresponds with the egg white snail shell sitting in the center of the canvas. The cartoon squirrel frame thus tends to physically consume the painting by piercing through its boundaries and blurring the line between the respective beginnings and ends. The title of the exhibition, Swallowing the Pit, is sprinkled with a sense of levity and witticism. The dark humor of consuming part of the edible objects that is not supposed to be eaten parallels with the Asian proverb of “Finger cut-off, ten thousand fist-punchings, whoever lies has to swallow thousand needles”. Comparing the action of eating which disrupts the inside and outside of the physical body to the contemporary image consumption, Hier’s works confront the boobytrapping essence of modern food and product photography that turns natural products into symbols of consumerist desire, dragging the viewers away form their forced gullible state and returning the rendered images back to things. Stephanie Temma Hier was born in 1992 in Toronto, Canada and received her BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2014. She now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her painting reflects the experience of traversing digital space in the 21st Century, mimicking the adage “falling down the rabbit hole” to describe the contemporary imagery consumption and visual culture, in which meanings fluctuate as images are brought together temporarily by seemingly indifferent big data algorithm to hierarchies of high and low culture values. Recent solo exhibitions include: “Spring Now Comes Unheralded" at Franz Kaka, Toronto, 2020; “Gridded and Girdled” at Y2K group, New York, 2019; and her solo exhibition “Swallow the Pit” with Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai in 2020. |
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