Rose Kallal at Lyles & King

Artist: Rose Kallal

Exhibition title: Four Pillars

Venue: Lyles & King, New York, US

Date: June 9 – July 2, 2016

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Lyles & King, New York

Rose Kallal’s colluding components, her cast of objects – projectors, film loops, reel-to-reel players, audio loops, canvas, table and lamp – speak of endless collapse and rebirth through technology on the brink of obsolescence. The great material and “mattered” hopes, its pillars, of last century (celluloid and audio-tape) and techniques (cutting and splicing) come together as a Plato’s Cave show of sound, light and image.

In the first of two galleries paintings on canvas generated by video synthesis and feedback reconsider the passing and fading signals of past decades: video-spells cast on canvas. In the second gallery four 16mm projectors loop through geometric and primary forms composed in vivid red; green-tinged and solarflared white light. As the images sync in and out phase one is reminded of early science fiction movie special effects that represent time-travel or early experiments in liquid crystal visuals for happenings a hypnotic wash of images that break upon the wall accompanied by Kallal’s own music: an out-of phase pulsing and trance-like wash of sound. (Kallal is an accomplished musician and has performed at Sonic Acts, Amsterdam; CTM Festival, Berlin; Performa and MoMA PS1.)

Caught between the two galleries Kallal’s key sculpture The Drop (2016): a glowing vase-cum-receptacle with a bulb like center (a pineal gland of sorts and center of the exhibition) sits on a glowing plinth readied to receive as an eagles claw falls from the ceiling clutching a clear glass orb. Philosopher René Descartes referred to the pineal gland as the Seat of the Soul, he believed it to be the psychedelic point of connection between the intellect and the body.

Kallal is strictly analog, by that I mean she believes in the moment, in touch and in the wash of sound and image. She looks to non-linear and non-progressive forms both in terms of her suggested narrative – film loops and audio reels – and her chosen means of production, the 16mm film projector and the reel-to-reel. Art too can loop, folding back on itself to reconsider its history (two current examples: Eighties geometric abstraction and the roots of Seventies contemporary dance) in order to find new exit-strategies and the route to new thought. Kallal’s work phases in-and-out of sync a shifting ritualized present: caught in a loop and ever communing with the present.

Text by Mark Beasley, 2016

Rose Kallal is a NYC based artist working with installation, sound and performance. She has presented her work internationally at many venues, galleries and festivals including Bologna Museum of Modern Art (Bologna, Italy), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow, UK), MoMA PS1 (New York, NY), Serralves Foundation (Porto, Portugal), Participant Inc (New York, NY), Ramiken Crucible (New York, NY), Wysing Arts Centre (Cambridge UK), Lisa Cooley Gallery (New York, NY), Performa 09 & 15 (New York), Microscope Gallery (New York, NY), Pioneer Works (New York, NY), Gavin Brown’s Enterprises at Passerby (New York, NY), Spike Island Art Centre (Bristol, UK), Fargfabriken (Stockholm, Sweden), Sonic Acts Festival (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Scratch series performance for Lightcone (Paris, France), CTM Festival (Berlin, Germany), Unconscious Archives #17, (London, UK).