HERE’S THE THING…
Kenni Dankert, Leah Netsky, Perla Segovia, Anna Brody, Marta Lee, Bella Varela
Curated by Kenzie Wells
02.03.23-02.24.23
Opening Reception | Friday, February 3: 6-9 pm
Here’s the Thing… is an exhibition of artworks that recognize the aliveness in things. According to "thing theory," coined by Bill Brown in 2001, objects become things once they no longer achieve their original function or intent; they are either broken or deemed outdated and therefore unusable. The six artists in the exhibition—Perla Segovia, Kenni Dankert, Bella Varela, Marta Lee, Anna Brody, and Leah Netsky—were selected based on their creative dedication to thingness. This could be things embedded with narrative, things that are repurposed into something new, things that are activated for memory or intimacy, or things that serve as totems, carrying the energy of something that once was. Each artwork recognizes the magic in things, perhaps even deems them more powerful than the objects they once were.
Varying perspectives are informed through memory and touch in Marta Lee’s acrylic abstraction of a chair cradling a hat, while refrigerator photos and magnets act as nostalgic portals of childhood in Kenni Dankert’s photographic imagery. A slab of ground beef is turned into silky pink plastic in Leah Netsky’s 3D printed object, toying the line between food and technology. In Bella Varela’s suspended, mixed-media work, articles of clothing are personified to explore intersections of immigration, sexuality, and gender identity, while Anna Brody’s video documents a live performance of platonic intimacy initiated through a static orb lamp. A dead hummingbird is given new life as cast glass in Perla Segovia’s mixed-media wall piece, honoring a man who died crossing the borderlands near Tucson, AZ in 2009. In his shirt pocket he carried a small, dead hummingbird. Segovia comments, “I would like to think he was very aware of the powerful epistemologies of the hummingbird.”
01- Leah Netsky, 3D printed ground beef from Animal Prints series, pink silk PLA filament
02-Marta Lee, Blue Chair, Acrylic & SoFlat on paper
03-Perla Segovia, Huitzilopochtli, cast glass, screenprint embroidery on glass, artificial cuetlaxochitl (poinsettia) flowers, wood