CU~ the gentle engine of de-asphyxiation
by Julian Yi-Zhong Hou

Posted by @hauntprojects on 10/14/2023

Housed in Christian Vistan’s parents’ home, and as a result of their ongoing move underway, the final show at dreams comma delta (titled CU~) saw the exhibition space spread beyond the usual pale teal carpeted bedroom onto the pale grey carpet of the bare living room floor, spilling out into a front yard BBQ party and garage sale. With my shoes off, I am welcomed on the floor by a modest and delicate ceramic fountain, Egg on mountain, by Mona Lisa Ali. A gurgling spiritual ornament, Egg anchors the exhibition in the material fluidity of changes and renewal. These meditations on states of collapse and the collapse of states are pronounced in Elisa Ferrari’s Litany for the teal carpet, a procession of timbral and field compositions focused on the hypnosis of pitter patter and spectral quiver, flailing colonic whirls, and the soul arcs of decaying technological squelches. As neighbouring sound pieces pool together in thresholds, my cat’s-eye view is drawn to Rachelle Sawatsky’s psychological slideshow exhibited in a wall cavity’s roiling interstices, a rorschach reversal where we interpret the mind of the rorschach artist and the unconscious symbols that spill around. Tumbling onto the teal carpet I find the space besmirched by Tiziana La Melia and Ellis Sam’s salt, cabbage, and sunscreen sculpture with audio poem Sour Sun, Moon Screen an all encompassing spell. Possessed by the freshness of live cultures, spoken verse wafts vortextually through spiralling frequencies, articulations of erosion and digestion, stethoscopically obscured and ephemerally dissipated. This digestive sublimation condenses into ghostly sunscreen gestures on the gallery window, which opens into an exploded view of a wheat-pasted collage by Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes. Hung against the outside fence like a cautionary BEWARE OF DOG sign, Shasta 2 offers various collages of Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the underworld (and terrorizes my cat eye). Are we to suppose that most of what’s “out there” is in fact dead, and that this collapsed living/exhibition space is in fact the bubble of new life like the gurgle of Ali’s sculpture? A glance backward and Douglas Watt’s Star to Fall hits like a scalar melancholic signature and tells me it’s time to leave the room. I go outside, I can’t eat the gluten and sugar of the cake that Claire Geddes Bailey made for the end of dreams comma delta, but i’ll have a drink and a smoke and chat instead and I leave thinking about all the new ways of showing and being together.

-Julian Yi-Zhong Hou

[Image description: An installation view of “CU~” at dreams comma delta. Artworks are displayed on the floor and walls of a grey carpeted room with a dropped ceiling, and on the mantel and hearth of its fireplace. The fireplace and the wall behind it are finished with polychrome brickwork. A window on the right wall leaks light through blinds and a sheer curtain. On the left side of the room is a flat file cabinet and, beyond that, an open door leading to another room.]

[Image description: An installation view of “CU~” at dreams comma delta. “Sour Sun, Moon Screen,” 2023, by Ellis Sam and Tiziana La Melia is displayed on a low, rectangular plinth in a teal carpeted room. On the back wall is an untitled drawing by Juan Cisneros Neumann. To the left of the plinth, a darkened doorway reveals a narrow glimpse of an illuminated screen, displaying digital drawings by Rachelle Sawatsky.]

CU~
Claire Geddes Bailey, Douglas Watt, Elisa Ferrari, Ellis Sam, Juan Cisneros Neumann, Linda Neumann Castillo, Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes, Megan Hepburn, Mona Lisa Ali, Rachelle Sawatsky, Tiziana La Melia
Curated by Aubin Kwon and Christian Vistan
dreams comma delta
June 25-July 16, 2023

Images courtesy of the
artists and gallery:
pgs. 2-3, 7 | Installation views of CU~

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