in its wake
Tussle Projects is excited to present “in its wake” an exhibition featuring seven artists exploring the tenderness and callousness of humanity in the wake of trauma, exploitation and other calamities and chaos. This exhibition points to a charged moment in the present and provides a departure for imaginative glimpses of the future.
Melanie Daniel
Fleur Helluin
Kristen Heritage
Julia Kissina
Kristin Osterberg
Kassandra Palmer
Carrie Wilmarth
The stillness in Melanie Daniel’s paintings have a tension and a tranquility in the reassuring tropes but there is a sense of loss and most particularly gestures that point to what could be next.
Fleur Helluin works are strongly rooted in the present. A response to current experiences and trends. Characters are tangled in thoughts and seemingly, the unraveling of their identities. They shed a new light on the paradoxical mechanisms of the perception of ourselves and the world, engaging strongly with the present. "The best personal expression actually comes when one is forgetting about the ego, therefore of the everyday mundane winds."
Kristen Heritage meditates on the mundane. The seemingly unimportant events that importantly shape our identity. The solitariness that we have experienced to an extreme as of late and the meandering about how our relationships have shifted. Heritage explores the mythologization of mundane experiences, spaces, and objects, utilizing a mixture of traditional and digitally-aided techniques and drawing references from recent internet culture as well as medieval art and mysticism.
Julia Kissina is interpreting human behavior in her work by concentrating on the idiosyncrasies of our rituals and relations. Aiming to diminish the facades of preset social and capitalistic behaviors. How do we make sense of a façade that remains one, especially in the world of art, which is supposedly given to a trenchant, truthful analysis of human behavior? Kissina is interested in the undercurrents of eroticism and even violence in supposedly polite society: people, half-human creatures, and strange animals populate cocktail parties whose participants are partly taken from vintage film noir and partly derived from Kissina’s unusual, telling ability to describe the inherent complexities of contemporary social life.
In Kristen Osterberg’s paintings we see the artist’s reality visually recreated. Disrupting the context and relational reality. The work becomes an experimental space to reframe the present. Osterberg's work is an exploration of longingness and loneliness leading up to the present. They are also experiments in light, perspective, and storytelling.
Kassandra Palmer uses minimalistic meditations and repetitive figures which are interacting in ways which asks questions about modes of communication and the consequences of these modes through process. Palmer's works are imbued with a lighthearted humor, these little beacons are flattened stories retold in the wrong order by an unreliable, but earnest, witness. Each paradoxical proposition is hopeful, and each leaves room for the survival of the unexpected.
Carrie Wilmarth similarly explores human existence and experience with the intensity of realism in her paintings and through her awareness of the subconscious in a hallucinatory fashion.Wilmarth sees her work as tragicomic explorations of human existence and experience. Recently she has been interested in ideas of isolation, longing, lack, and desire; their centrality to the queer experience and their increasingly significant role in the phenomenon of American individualism. Investigating how desire works in our society—the ways in which it has contributed to strange perceptions of ourselves and each other, and the psychological toll of a society consumed by an endless, nameless longing.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
These artists masterfully provide a glance of a present moment. These glances are projections of ourselves and our experiences, the objects in our surroundings and their meaning. Through imagination can we determine the future? Is this a mapping of what is to come in its wake.
- Laura Horne, September 2021