The Fourth Wall

The Fourth Wall
David Hendren and Sami Korkiakoski
April 13 - May 18, 2019

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players”
- As You Like It, William Shakespeare

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present The Fourth Wall, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of David Hendren and Sami Korkiakoski. The show is named for the performance convention that imagines a wall––or, more aptly, a one-way mirror––separating actor from audience, where the former stays absorbed in its fiction, seemingly unaware of the very existence (let alone gaze) of the latter.  An interesting power dynamic results: the object of the gaze maintains the power to interrupt it, to break the imagined distance between actor and audience, and by doing so, to renew that well-turned Shakespearean verse.

Much like that of a stage designer, Los Angeles-based artist David Hendren’s multisensory approach to artmaking takes into account the space, body, form, color, light, sound, movement, and tone of each sculpture.  In this way, every work acts as a kind of installation. With site-specific acoustics and interplays of light, his works wed objecthood to both time and space––a marriage that is, in reality, never broken, but so often neglected in a contemporary society that presupposes harmony. David’s work takes that presupposition and elevates it to the realm of the ethereal...though certainly by ironic means. He creates visual and auditory dissonance. He shows us familiar forms in unfamiliar places—recognizable symbols in foreign contexts. We, the audience, enter into his works much as we do entering into a new city: with sensorial hyperawareness; with a bodily acknowledgment of and relationship to a myriad of individual stimuli––ones we perceive as well as ones we create.

Likewise, this tension––between the unknown and the known, the supernal and the grotesque––is prevalent in the work of Finnish artist Sami Korkiakoski. At first glance, the crude forms of his dense paintings seem rendered with the abandonment of a whirling dervish. Surrounded by seven of these paintings, we get swept up in their storm. We can locate a series of letters and sound them out in our head, but they seem only to speak of entropy. In this way, Korkiakoski’s work directly addresses the logic from which it deviates. Precisely through our pursuit to make “sense” of his use of letters, the works demonstrate the limitations of language for communication. Or, perhaps more precisely, it opens us to see that language is not always logical, and that logic has never been all-encompassing. 

Amidst this exhibition, the exclusionary artifice of what we so often label “harmony” breaks down. We begin to feel a heightened sense of our own relationship to a much larger, unknowable architecture. It is something like a temple without any institutional underpinnings. It is a place that facilitates our engagement in the parts of personhood that cannot be contained by walls––feeling, thinking, being.

Download:
Press Release

images by Charles White, JWPictures.com

Belldog live at Lowell Ryan Projects
Saturday, May 11, 2019 8pm

Please join us on Saturday, May 11th for an immersive evening with Belldog (David Hendren and Patrick Smith). The duo will perform among Hendren's sculptures and Sami Korkiakoski's paintings on view as part of the two-person exhibition, The Fourth Wall. The evening’s performance will be a total sensory experience, using sound, light, and more to create a contemplative space

David Hendren and Patrick Smith have been improvising music together with Hendren on guitar and Smith on modular synth for many years. They would eventually form the band Belldog, named after a song from the 1978 Eno Moebius Roedelius album, After the Heat. Belldog's first album, Strawberry at the Wedding, is available on bandcamp. The album pulls from their meditative weekly improvised sets of cavernous guitar sounds and electronic loops. They are currently working on a new album to be released this fall.

belldog.bandcamp.com