The Secret life of Objects curated by Barbara Ess and organized by Peggy Ahwesh

About

The Secret Life of Objects

On view September 7–October 16, 2021

Reception: Saturday, September 18 from 3pm–6pm

Curated by Barbara Ess 

Organized by Peggy Ahwesh

Works and contributions by:

Barbara Ess

Dan Graham

Daniella Dooling

Glenn Branca

Heidi Schlatter

Laura Battle

Les LeVeque

Maximilian Goldfarb

Mieko Meguro

Radio/Guitar

The Secret Life of Objects is a group exhibition that Barbara Ess was in the process of curating when she died unexpectedly March 4, 2021. In tribute to her artistic vision, the gallery along with Peggy Ahwesh, a close friend and collaborator of Ess, has organized the exhibition in Ess' honor. Works by ten artists are on view, including key pieces by Ess as well as her avant garde music project with Ahwesh, "Radio/Guitar." The Secret Life of Objects is a meaningful way to keep Barbara Ess' voice and influence present in our midst as well as honor her life-long pursuit of questioning and manifesting the unknown and the unseen. 

The exhibition focuses on the hidden meaning behind objects and the nostalgia they evoke— either serving as surfaces for our sentimental projections or becoming mediators of different realities such as fetishes, heirlooms and cult objects. Ess was equally fascinated by the idea of panpsychism, or the view that all things have minds. Considering the spiritually-charged or the spiritual ether (a material substance believed to exist between the earth and astral plane) in the wake of Ess' passing promotes open-ended answers to our most existential questions. 

Works on view involve mediumship—such as Daniella Dooling's explorations of her grandmother's channeled communications with the supernatural world—and collaborations with the past, as in Laura Battle's drawings made on found ledger paper salvaged from an old drugstore fire in Hudson, New York. Other works, such as Heidi Schlatter's barricades invoke the commodity as an apparatus of meaning-making. The exhibition also presents work by Dan Graham, an early collector of Ess' photography, and Glenn Branca, an experimental musician who was an important partner to Ess personally, musically, and artistically for more than 20 years.

Ess' world circulated around her intimate, artistic life—with the starting point for many of her works being her own body as both self and other. She kept her activities close to home, her materials and objects close at hand, and friends close to her heart—the radical subjectivity of a generative and uncompromising artist. The chosen artists for The Secret Life of Objects were some of her closest friends in the final decade of her life and she enjoyed a camaraderie of creative principles with each of them. In the studio visits she did with the artists, Ess was invigorated by the energy and power made manifest in the material objects they created and the dynamic triangulation between the artist, the object, and herself as a sacred circuit of friendship and creative thought.