Sydney Shen. Master's Chambers

About

The exhibition consists of a single installation, which spans both the upper and lower levels of the gallery. The work expands beyond the physical and is further augmented in the form of a downloadable horror-survival video game.*

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A fragment of a sentence suddenly, without any reason, has come to mind, something like: “...in the splendour of the catacombs, a crime with useless, baroque ornaments…”

Vox humana. Echoes of a past performance still pervade the derelict chambers where her musicians have long departed. Vox vermis.

Ground human bone, rodent remains, cyanobacteria, mashed to a pulp in a flagrant violation of taxonomy. Hidden surfaces, shellacked with donkey hide glue. Scarified plastic hangs on acid-burned steel skeletons, a morbid plasma of rust and refuse collecting in its veins. Fungus decompose every reverberation within the mechanical viscera of a prepared piano. Septic-safe one-ply roses litter the floor. Indeed beneath the soiled petals lurks a subterranean latrine.

Doomed to sentience in the company of objects, the maestro awaits trespass.
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Sydney Shen (b. 1989) lives and works in New York, NY. Recent exhibitions include; Hester (NYC), Springsteen Gallery (Baltimore), Fused Space (San Francisco), Derek Eller Gallery (New York), and American Medium (Brooklyn). Forthcoming exhibitions include High Tide (Philadelphia), Sydney (Sydney), and a partner show at Weekends (London). Shen is co-author of Perfume Area, a book of prose published by Ambient Works (New York). This is her first solo exhibition.

*The artist would like to thank Nicholas O’Brien for his help in creating the game.