Catharine Czudej. Happy Birthday.

About

Oversized, silhouetted figures cast in sandblasted aluminium stand and kneel in the space. Arms outstretched, bouquets of flowers are offered or weigh them to the floor. Their billowed forms – recalling the balloon models of children’s birthday parties – assume an exaggerated anatomical frame; a distorted metric by which the viewer can reinterpret those objects in view.

Swamp coolers release bursts of shimmer from repurposed domestic cool-boxes. Their debris carpets the floor and accumulates in crystalline mounds, gently obfuscating pathways. Viewers are invited to pass through an iridescent waterfall and explore darker corners, accompanied by the muffled hum of these makeshift machines.

Adorning the walls, a series of paintings rendered in bismuth and aluminium absorb the gallery’s light patterns and the aspect of anything in their path. These bejewelled, mirrored surfaces and obliterated forms emerge through a pseudo-industrial process involving atomic crystallization and plasma cutting; re-engineering one of earth’s most stable elements to take on artifactual form.

Happy Birthday is a proverbial wonderland – an elysium where the proximity of experience is rolled out as its own agentic force. Through a confabulation of materials, scales, form and function, Czudej presents an adjunct proposition; a place where everything is up for grabs.