Artist: Amy Stober
Exhibition title: Holding Patterns
Venue: Springsteen, Baltimore, US
Date: July 3 – August 7, 2021
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Springsteen, Baltimore
I get to thinking… Sometimes it’s like: Every single thing happens at once, or else not at all. All about titles, less about content
I am loved before precedent, that is no good
I’ve done many things on accident and even more things on purpose The fact of the matter is…
In my dream it was the end of the world and I got muffins somehow. One was chocolate and huge You give to Morpheus and he gives back
Your thoughts are matter. Pick them up and throw them around
I still don’t understand all of this primordial shit, but I guess I’ll just let it rock Love is a secret you carry with you
Springsteen is pleased to present Holding Patterns, a solo exhibition by Amy Stober, marking her solo debut. Holding Patterns alludes to a moment of stasis, the pregnancy of stillness. A plane suspended in flight, waiting on the go-ahead for landing. In stillness or perceived immobility there exists a process borne of latency, anxiety, calculation.
Obsessively process-oriented, Stober catechizes the given in favor of the exceptional. How to pervert forms and conceptions? Basking in the autogenous gives way to a universal spirit. Look within to implore without. Presuppositions fall away as new understandings of essence metamorphosize. Stober is meticulous, presenting objects charged with potential, memory, the interrogation of time, and presence.
Her practice is deeply rooted in the processional, a creative digestive tract. She begins by inputting two of her own images in Dreamscope, an artificial intelligence program which transforms photos into mangled recreations. A quick Google search of the app yields bulbous and grotesque images of politicians, landscapes, and animals all suffering aesthetic upheavals in service of the new. Stober rejects this supposed end goal and attacks her images yet again, by hand painting the neural network’s productions onto various paraphernalia. This reproductive methodology is her very own encryption tool.
She establishes a collaborative relationship with the virtual, while maintaining staunch footing in the material world by physically painting her array of vessels. These are containment devices, markedly sentimental, diaristic. She largely renders these works in acrylic, though painterly casting material proliferates. The latter substance yields unruly lines, this where an abstraction of brushstroke is activated.
Stober understands her own information by organizing what could be taken-for-granted as imminent. She contends that her process underscores “repetitive personal archivation [as] a comprehension tool,” a “a visual approximation for memory recall.” By casting her objects, Stober freezes them in time, allowing one to behold a calculated limbo.
– Reilly Davidson
