Quite Fairly Rather at Topless

Artists: Lauren Clay, Carey Denniston, Hanne Lippard

Exhibition title: Quite Fairly Rather

Venue: Topless, Rockaway Beach, New York, US

Date: July 25 – August 9, 2015

Photography: Images courtesy of the artists and Topless, New York

The tide rolls in and the tide rolls out. Taking with it the shifting planar remembrances upon which we used to stand. This transformation a translation of our longing.

Lauren Clay’s wallpaper works are spatial and sculptural. Illusionistic in form, they create a dialog between spatial perception and the transformation of collapsed space to three- dimensional space. Upon installation, the wallpaper appears to distort the gallery, naturally generating an idea of depth. The image comes from a traditional, analog process, which is repetitive but unpredictable. The works feel consequently disorienting in relation to the digitally produced images and graphics with which we are so accustomed.

Carey Denniston’s Untitled (Mats) is an ongoing body of work (2014- present) composed of sculptures cast from used car floor mats. The casts combine crushed seashell and blackened plaster, and replicate the pattern and worn texture of the original found objects. The height of each cast is varied, scaled upwards of ten inches. With extruded shape and altered materiality the form resembles a tablet or tombstone – a sculpture oscillating between monumentalism and low commodity culture.

Hanne Lippard’s practice explores the voice as a medium. Like all constructions of the mind, Lippard’s work starts with the word. If the world appears to us in language, she is measuring its scale through words. The matter of words is what matters, though not as a matter of facts. Their sounds read out in rhyme and with rhythm—the use of the voice, capturing space in the world by measuring time, wanting to give body to time when time doesn’t have it.

Hanne Lippard, Translations by Caucasions, 2013