Revealing Reflected Refractions

About

At turns playful, conspiratorial, empathic, humorous, political, and sensorial, the works in this exhibition serve as prisms that refract unseen truths, illuminating the familiar in unexpected ways.

Karin Ferrari’s video unmasks subliminal messages and manipulations in the media by analyzing the opening graphics of Zeit im Bild, Austria’s national news show. By using fringe belief systems ranging from mind control, space colonization, the Illuminati and alchemy to deconstruct the seemingly innocuous, Ferrari asks us to question who is informing our worldview, and to what end. Alternating between deadpan and tongue-in-cheek, she shows us that much of what we believe is shaped by our own biases.    

Hai-Hsin Huang’s drawings and paintings are humorous depictions of people going about their everyday lives. As an emigrant from Taiwan to the U.S. who has also spent time in Europe and Asia, Huang holds a metaphorical mirror to citizens of the various cultures she is a part of, both as participant and outside observer. Seeing human experience through this lens, the viewer is imparted with greater empathy for the absurdities of human existence.

Alison Kudlow uses the light of the sun to create work that questions the dogma of science and religion. By translating and describing the intangible qualities of reflected and refracted light into sculptural forms that can only fail to translate an experience perfectly, her work reveals the fragile beauty inherent in our attempts to make sense of the world.

Nooshin Rostami’s site-specific sculpture is both a bridge and an obstacle made of moveable reflective materials set in black sand and iron filings. Serving as a metaphor for international migration and exile informed by personal experience, Rostami shifts viewers’ experiences of the gallery space by asking them to navigate through and around a precarious structure.