In their first collaboration, artists Roxana Azar and Alex Kovacs position their opposite material and aesthetic sensibilities in a series of installation vignettes. These pairings transform and compliment the individual pieces within, creating new shrines and portals that are dislocated from specific historical or cultural context; simultaneous artifacts and futuristic discoveries.
With each moment of overlap, objects that are functional, decorative, sculptural, hand-made, digital, painted, photographic, gravity-bound and atmospheric both bask in and overcome their apparent contradictions. While the pieces each stand on their own, created in the artists’ geographically separate, individual studios, they take on a symbiosis that multiplies their potential – merging references from geometric temples and pagodas to nebulous foliage and galaxies.
Roxana’s work relies on photography and digital manipulation, printed into synthetic materials, that are machine-cut into organic, or soft-edged forms. Flat outlines cast colors and patterns making space a flexible, additional aspect of the viewing experience. Alex’s hand-built ceramics are black and white, planar, and suggest a digital perfection in their linear patterns and grids. Slim, similar vases are adorned in charms, chains, handles and stretch the language of the traditional ceramic vessel into fashion and architecture.
Recognizing the expansive ethos of their individual practices, the two artists began a conversation from afar and collaboration by mail. Documenting the surprising interactions of the opaque, structural vessels and translucent, digital shapes, tiny pairings turned into still lives, which became arrangements and formed the foundation of this antithetical past/future world.
Throughout the gallery, each artist’s vision is fully immersed into the other’s, each relinquishing a set authorship or expected definition of voice. Futures Passed asks us to consider the lines that are drawn in art and design, or commodity and experience, and find the magic that exists in the paradox.
- written by Alex Ebstein