↳ Exhibitions

Lili Huston-Herterich & Katharina Cameron at Zalucky Contemporary

July 9, 2023

Artists: Lili Huston-Herterich & Katharina Cameron

Exhibition title: Keeping Time with the Unrest

Venue: Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto, Canada

Date: June 17 – July 15, 2023

Photography: Em Moor, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Zalucky Contemporary

The exhibition presents a new series of photographs by Lili Huston-Herterich of puppets who comprise the cast of The Sack Hold You, Panter, a narrative video work using a rewritten version of Igor Stravinski’s ballet Le Sacre Du Printemps. In the original story, a gendered working body is sacrificed in response to a climate crisis. In Huston-Herterich’s version, the dance of the sacrificed victims shifts to a chosen and collective act of perpetual movement without exploitation – not a deadly dance but a never-ending one, a loop that does not begin or end at the same place, a process that is never final.

This temporal looping is echoed in Katharina Cameron’s recent cut-collages of watch advertisements, which conjure patriarchal megalomania and the futile quest to conquer time through linearity and inheritance. The cutting patterns are reminiscent of German Christmas star window hangings that the artist used to make with her family. The centre point of the star becomes the centre point of the watch face, connecting the measurement of time with the birth of Jesus Christ as its retroactive starting point. These works accompany Cameron’s stink bottles, an indefinite series of digital images made in collaboration with DALL·E (an AI text-to-image generator) of perfume bottles that hold invisible, intoxicating, and unknowable things.

Taken together, the works in the exhibition leave a trace: the puppets create and hold an imagined space of collective transformation, the mechanical “unrest” (unruh) of each cut watch questions the agenda of measured time, and the vessels shift and transform through their iterations. The constellation of images and the parade of characters contained therein make revision, repetition, and rehearsal visible.

– Lili Huston-Herterich

Keeping Time with the Unrest is organised by Lili Huston-Herterich. Her work in this exhibition is a continuation in form and subject of her mother Meg Huston’s artistic practice and their shared/inherited inspirations. Her invitation to Katharina Cameron is an extension of ongoing conversations between the two artists, in this instance manifested through aligning artistic practice. The artist would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for the presentation of this series in Toronto.

Lili Huston-Herterich is a white American-Canadian artist currently living in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Recent work has been exhibited at Peach (Rotterdam), Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe), Pumice Raft (Toronto), Apparatus Projects (Chicago), and Index Foundation (Stockholm). She has recently performed at Temporary Gallery (Köln), School of Commons (Zürich), and Klooster Oude Noorden (Rotterdam). She will be an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam starting in fall 2023.

Katharina Cameron is an artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her work has been exhibited at Kunstverein Nürnberg (Nürnberg), Pumice Raft (Toronto), Contemporary Fine Arts (Berlin), Available & The Rat (Rotterdam), and Palazzo San Giuseppe (Polignano a Mare). She completed a Masters Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, and is currently completing a second masters in Arts Education at UdK Berlin.

Lili Huston-Herterich & Katharina Cameron, Keeping Time with the Unrest, 2023, exhibition view, Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto

Lili Huston-Herterich, Portrait: The Busy & Cookie, 2023, Sewn chromogenic prints with black velvet mat, 33 x 26.75 inches framed

Lili Huston-Herterich, Portrait: Dumm, 2023, Sewn chromogenic prints, 33 x 26.75 inches framed

Lili Huston-Herterich, Portrait: Simmering, 2023, Sewn chromogenic prints with black velvet mat, 33 x 26.75 inches framed

Lili Huston-Herterich & Katharina Cameron, Keeping Time with the Unrest, 2023, exhibition view, Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto

Katharina Cameron, Untitled (Time Stoppeth), 2023, Cut collage of advertisement from The Economist, 16.25 x 12.25 inches framed

Lili Huston-Herterich & Katharina Cameron, Keeping Time with the Unrest, 2023, exhibition view, Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto

Lili Huston Herterich, Let Me Tell You About This Shoe (v2), 2023, Found boots, synthetic cotton and silk, epoxy, ink, with puppet (raku-fired ceramic, found rabbit fur, brass, copper, and plastic jewels), dimensions variable

Lili Huston-Herterich & Katharina Cameron, Keeping Time with the Unrest, 2023, exhibition view, Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto

Katharina Cameron, Untitled (stink bottles), 2023, Digital inkjet print of AI generated image using text prompt: vibrant analog photograph of a witchy perfume bottle made from cream inspired by a victorian frog with a bow on top, rhinestones, moody background, su…([sic] due to word count limit for filename), 10 x 8 inches

Katharina Cameron, Untitled (stink bottles), 2023, Digital inkjet print of AI generated image using text prompt: a witchy perfume bottle frog chimera made from snot and pearls, dramatic background, sfumato-style painting, 10 x 8 inches