Towards a Mythopoeic Sovereignty
(…)Upon encountering The Abdication, Mood’s sequential installation unfolds piece by piece as a filial rite of passage. Mood entices the viewer in his role as the subject of his dramaturgical interpretation and response to his father’s cryptic mythology, left for Mood to decipher. Oneiric and uncanny, The Abdication is a visceral and emotional transmutation of the blurring of personal and fictitious narratives materialized through sculpture, performance, video, drawing, painting, object juxtaposition, and ritualization. Visually and symbolically reminiscent of the alchemical stages of the Hermetic tradition, The Abdication conjures parallels to the 16th-century illustrations of esoteric motifs later rigorously translated as unconscious representations of psychological phenomena guiding the process of individuation by Jung and his scholarly collaborator, Marie Louise von Franz.
Incorporate, blacken and disperse.
The entrance is almost blocked from within by a large wall mounted on wheels. Beyond it, a second mobile wall redirects visitors along a zigzag path. This architectural arrangement immediately draws them into the work. Turning deeper into the passage, they encounter a digital projection cast at a low angle toward the entrance. As the visitors cross it, their bodies interrupt the image, casting dark shadows onto the projection.
This is how Sediments (2025), a mixed-media installation by Anna Ridderstad, received its visitors at ID:I gallery in central Stockholm. Beyond the projection hung two suspended sculptures composed of alder trunks, eroded and blackened after years submerged in water.
The 181: Composition in Three Volumes.
WE WHO LOOK AFTER is a series of situation-specific compositions that took place between November 16 and November 18, 2024. The 181 (Brandon Boan, Abby Donovan, Tom Hughes, and Jason Rhodes), with special guests Sage Derezin, Eloise Fairbrother, and Kristen Morgin, gathered at three different sites across Los Angeles for compositions that jammed sonic, visual, climatic, and socially dynamic influxes into jazz-like collage phenomena. Each composition is the result of a performance that followed its own set of entropic rules, encompassing the geography of the landscape, heat, light, distances to both willing and unsuspecting audiences, and, of course, tools and instruments available to compose with. Through motion, color, sound, and the use of phantasmagoric labor, the 181 and guests improvised spontaneous melodies and scenographies that lifted the audience above the doldrums of chaos and kept us there just long enough to anticipate (and welcome?) gravity.
On being, waiting and looking. On Ozhopé collective.
Walking along a shore and looking at objects carried onto the sand by the sea current. Seeing these objects slowly piling up, one on top of the other, constructing something day after day. Organic matter mixes with residues of artificially produced goods. Colors vanish. Distinctions between the natural and the man-made disappear. Geological time blends with the capitalist one. The pace of local waves interacts with the rhythm of global systems of consumption, forming new conglomerates or new “things” that respond to the collapsing of time and space. This process opens up interstitial dimensions through which to view the world from delocalized angles.
Approaching the work of the Ozhopé collective requires awareness of invisible structures that operate in the “here and now” as much as in the “before and after.”