RED PATIENCE
Izidora L. LETHE and Johanna Breiding
04.17.2021 - 06.05.2021
The artists will be present 4.17 & 4.20
For additional information or to schedule an appointment please email info@bassandreiner.com
Up against another [human] being one’s own procedures take on definition.
We’re in a time of broken earth, where the idea of a stable ground is destabilized [...].
Between two crouching masses of the world, the world shows itself.
_________________
LISTEN to sound-piece RED PATIENCE (Distance) here
A volcano is a reminder of the earth’s insides, the trans-temporal reference of a million-year-old convulsion of flowing magma, suspended. Working through earthly crevices as departure-place for an embodied research, this collaborative exhibition delves into and indulges in the
Orifice
Fold
Opening
Mount
RED PATIENCE is a dialogue between Izidora L. LETHE and Johanna Breiding that both engages in and examines erotics through relationality by embodied research on volcanic lands and thereby encountered formal entanglements.
RED PATIENCE has been developed through pandemic months as an exchange of kindred co-labor between the artists: A shared methodology of creating haptic art works alongside each other in disparate places. In the context of contemporary disembodied all-digitized-relationality, the artists account for a shared desire to expand into deep time and learn the earth, look down, engage in multiple and complex layers of form, history, and composition. As the research of the volcanic is shaped by touch, literary and theoretic texts*, and sensuous tracing, the artists center a non-phallic cascading, erupting, cratering and inter-connected melting in this exhibition.
If rock can melt, form is not given.
RED PATIENCE is a proposition of placed research and collaboration through the (geological, shared and individual) body, particularly the non-binary one. The artists aim to erode single authorship toward shared thinking, expanded genres or a convolution of the idea of a clear reading of abstracted artworks. Instead, the artists allow for a (simultaneously alert and passionate) patience during this time of waiting, asserting feeling body and bodies to allow room and space beyond binary definition.
Swiss designer and sound artist A. Frei contributed in a furthered collaborative gesture with their design for the take-away risograph print, and soundpiece Red Patience (Distance) that visitors can access via QR code or link above for the duration of the exhibition. A Frei's sound work engages in the recently researched volcanic landscape of the Archipelago Chinijo. They work with attentive recordings: Touching of lava stones and swellings of the ocean on site, later combined with californian modular synthesis.
The artists want to thank Sho Halajian, A. Frei and the Bass and Reiner team.
*
1 Anne Carson Autobiography of Red
2 Kathryn Yussof Geologies of Race
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
- David Getsy Ten Queer Theses On Abstraction
Izidora L. LETHE is a research-based artist working across the disciplines, such as sculpture, drawing, choreography and video. Their work aims at expanding or eroding common histories, and re-orienting toward the body as place of deep knowledge.
LETHE received their MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI, 2017) and their BFA at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK, 2013). Their most recent exhibitions include the Leslie Lohman Museum (New York City, 2020>21); The Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, 2019-2020); The DeYoung Museum (San Francisco, 2017); Aggregate Space Gallery (Oakland, 2018) et al. LETHE received the merit-based full fellowship for their masters’ studies at SFAI, as well as the IMA-Fellowship of the New York Foundation for the Arts (2018). LETHE is a BANFF Centre for the Arts resident artist (Banff, Canada, 2018). They taught as guest faculty at the School of Art + Art History + Design of the University of Washington (UW, Seattle), the San Francisco Art Institute and F+F School of Arts, Zurich. Upcoming this year is an exhibition via Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich) on Monte Verità, Switzerland.
Johanna Breiding is a photographer, video and installation artist that employs analog and digital technologies to archive queer narratives and underrepresented voices. Through an interdisciplinary approach and varying forms of collaboration, Johanna Breiding depicts the importance of kinship and intergenerational exchange via autobiography, historical events, and the landscape as witness. They received their MA from the California Institute of the Arts and their BA from Scripps College. They have exhibited widely throughout the US and Europe and have received numerous awards including the DAAD, the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award and the SIFF award for the film made with Shoghig Halajian and the participation of Silvia Federici (author of Caliban and the Witch) and Glarus residents, The Rebel Body. This year they will be a TBA 21 Ocean Fellow in Venice, Italy as well as a resident at AiR 351 in Cascais, Portugal. They are represented by Ochi Projects in Los Angeles. Johanna Breiding views facilitating the arts as a practice of care and has been teaching interdisciplinary photography and theory courses at various institutions including the San Francisco Art Institute, California Institute of the Arts and Scripps College over the last years. Since 2019 Johanna Breiding is an Assistant Professor in the Art and Art History Department at Williams College.