White Columns Online #25:
Like a museum filled with things and bones
curated by Rachel Vera Steinberg
rosaire appel, Silent Song #20, 2023, Drawing. Ink on paper. 29 × 23 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Clare Churchouse
canary, 2022.
Thread, brads, pins, yarn, tape, wire, photographs, wood, mylar, ink, paper, sponge, wire mesh, gauze fabric, fabric, plastic mesh.
59 × 61 × 3 inches.
Courtesy of the artist.
Clare Churchouse
canary (detail, side view), 2022.
Thread, brads, pins, yarn, tape, wire, photographs, wood, mylar, ink, paper, sponge, wire mesh, gauze fabric, fabric, plastic mesh.
59 × 61 × 3 inches.
Courtesy of the artist.
Coco Klockner
Good Name/Dead Name, 2022.
Burnt trail shoes, altered music stands, greenware, polyester bow, resin
36 × 36 × 34 in.
Courtesy of the artist
Coco Klockner
Femme Brother Printer, 2019.
Brother laser printer, mixed media
26 × 40 × 25 in.
Courtesy of the artist
Coco Klockner
Dysphoria i, 2020.
5-gallon bucket, dirt, wood, paint, steel wire
12 x12 x28 in.
Courtesy of the artist.
Margrit Olsen
Artifact From Memory, 2021.
Fine Art Inkjet Print
297 × 420 cm
Courtesy of the artist
Margrit Olsen
Film Sediment / Untitled, 2022.
Fine Art Inkjet Print
42 × 32 cm
Courtesy of the artist
Lauren Dahlia Schaffer
Dirty Sweep : rue interieur, 2018.
brass, bronze, white bread, silicone
7 × 7 × 5 in.
Courtesy of the artist.
Lauren Dahlia Schaffer
Dirty Sweep : Untitled, 2015 – 2022.
Nickel-plated copper wire, Ceratomia undulosa moth larva
4.5 × 2.5 × 4 in.
Courtesy of the artist.
Julia Taszycka
The Sole Result is the Game, 2022.
installation: found objects, gaff tape
Courtesy of the artist.
Julia Taszycka
Break 47 with a Nail, 2023.
metal stud, hardware
3 3/4 × 47 × 3 in.
Courtesy of the artist.
Julia Taszycka
Break 45 × 2, 2023.
metal stud, hardware
45 × 26 × 28 in.
Courtesy of the artist.
Vy Trịnh
Honda Dream II, 2022.
Honda Dream II moped chassis, found dolly, metal scraps, brass, aluminum, found bumper, rubber, found tree branch, plastic wrap, and epoxy putty.
39 × 52 × 69 inches
Courtesy of the artist.
Vy Trịnh
Honda (KIA), 2023.
Found bumper, PETG, metal rod, nickel plated steel ball chain, brass, flux, cable zip tie, and epoxy putty.
19 × 16 × 21 inches
Courtesy of the artist.
Exhibition Description
In the last scene of the 2018 Swedish sci-fi film Aniara, unrecognizable detritus floats inside of an aimless space ship nearly six million years after its voyage began. The film, which is based on Harry Martinson’s book-length science fiction poem from the mid-1950s, attempts to touch the deep psychological melancholy of a passenger space shuttle doomed to drift directionless through space for all of eternity. Thrown off its course without fuel to redirect itself in the very beginning of the story, the majority of the film details the slow collapse of this micro-society as supplies, populations, and hopes dwindle. This event is felt viscerally through this final scene where the entropy of the physical matter that once supported life breaks into fine particulates.
This exhibition explores the ways that things—materials, ideas, language, time—have come apart from themselves. The works included embody abstractions through separation, distillation, and reconfiguration. In most cases, the works have grown out of recognizable, mundane objects, but through processes of improvisation and extraction from their use-function, they have become category-avoidant and strange. These objects are not discarded or disused, rather they catalog the interstices of breakdowns where meanings collapse or reconfigure through the slow drift of functions and values.
As science fiction narratives offer mirrors-at-a-distance to their concurrent conditions, Aniara reflects the psychological and material impacts of nuclear terror from the time it was first written, and the rampant social, political, and environmental collapse of the present. Similarly, the artworks within this exhibition outline the broader stakes of our current moment, wherein meaning cannot be understood as a given. Things break down into fragments, are re-possessed into new orders, present as alternative schematics, offer new visual languages, and disintegrate the infrastructure of capitalist production. The title is taken from the very last chapter of Martinson’s poem, detailing the descent of the ship’s microcosm into a sarcophagus, “like a museum filled with things and bones.” One is left to wonder if this museum represents life, supports it, or if its future was ever alive to begin with.
Rachel Vera Steinberg is a curator based in New York City. Her work explores cultural mythmaking, the world-building methodologies found in science fiction, as well as political and historical distinctions between facts and fictions. Since the beginning of her career she has focused primarily on the presentation of time-based media. She is the Curator & Director of Exhibitions at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY where she oversees the production of ambitiously-scaled installations and exhibitions. She was the Director of SOHO20 Artists Inc (2015-2018) and the Assistant Director of NURTUREart Non-Profit Inc (2010-2015). She has taught at FIT, RISD, and the New School. She has a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MA in Curatorial Studies from Bard College.
This exhibition is the twenty-fifth in a series of online exhibitions curated exclusively from White Columns’ Curated Artist Registry.