Moment I | Ever— at Shimmer

Artists: Ruth Buchanan, Damon Zucconi, Laurel Schwulst and Sydney Shen

Exhibition title: Moment I | Ever—

Curated by: Shimmer (Eloise Sweetman and Jason Hendrik Hansma)

Venue: Shimmer, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Date: February – June, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Shimmer, Rotterdam

We present to you our first moment, of wavering and shifting endeavors. In MOMENT I | EVER— works by RUTH BUCHANAN, DAMON ZUCCONI, LAUREL SCHWULST & SYDNEY SHEN are brought together. At this moment we are broadly thinking about the lingering encounter and the anticipation that comes with it. We experience this with Ruth Buchanan’s chain curtain Staunch, IN and break, break, break (2018) that both simultaneously reveals, obscures, and slips from our fingers. Whereas, Serpentine (2016) by Damon Zucconi in collaboration with Laurel Schwulst and Sydney Shen is like the perfume it reviews, punctuating our senses with rapid bursts of text and sound. Laurel and Sydney are PERFUME AREA, an artistic project that tries to capture the high, mid, and low notes of fragrance in lyrical form. Their collection ‘Perfume Area’ (2015), published by Ambient Works, is presented here in the space. Damon’s print Eurphobia Milii (2018) is both indeterminate and thorny giving us the ability to be present and absent at the same time. Zucconi created a technique to ‘neutralize color perceptually by rotating portions of an image in contrasting 90-degree hue shift’. In doing, so the work changes intensity depending on what position our bodies’ take in front of it. Hovering above our shoulders as we work Ruth’s drawing Wavy line is drawn across the middle of the original plans (2016/2018) intersects the curtain, breaking its verticality. All the works in MOMENT I | EVER— shift and break ever-so-slightly the way we see.

We are creating SHIMMER with studio mentality where knowledge arises through participation and experimentation. In this way, we hope the artworks and the multifaceted others gather and stretch across time. To do this, we are creating an expanded group exhibition that will be developed in dialogue with the artists where artworks fade in and out of sight in shifting rhythms.