Luca Rekosh, 2024
Basement Workshop Series
18 April – 19 May 2024
207 Clinton Street, NYC, NY, 10002
LUmkA is pleased to present its second exhibition, Basement Workshop Series, at 207 Clinton Street, NYC, NY. Opening 18 April the exhibition will present a rotation of three installations by Ashley Condina, Lucy Tarquinio, and Luca Rekosh. Please join us for the opening reception of each installation, 18 April, 24 April, and 9 May 2024 from 7 - 9 PM.
Now, more than ever, the notion of agency in media participation is illusory. In the words of Guy Debord, “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image.” The Age of Information has organized a model of hyper accessible consumption of said image. Spectacle, as it operates in today’s image-based culture, propagates an entitlement to view, consume, have access to, and excess of. This positive feedback loop alters the collective subconscious and brings about the normalization of (and desensitization to) voyeurism.
In response, LUmkA invites three artists of varying disciplines to contribute site-specific work to its unconventional basement setting. The space, only accessible by ladder, hinders and interrupts the gaze as an effort to question consumption and commodification.
Observed singularly, the exhibition asks each viewer to contemplate and challenge their own subconscious voyeuristic tendencies. Each artist’s experimental and multi-sensory language complicates the relationship between viewer and viewed, while exploring themes of surveillance, subjectivity, and accessibility. Refusing immediacy of consumption, Basement Workshop Series stages an intervention for intentional and self-aware perception.
ASHLEY CONDINA: Crypt
18 - 21 April 2024 | Opening Reception 7 -9 PM 18 April 2024
Concerned with the dichotomy between the preserved and the omitted, Condina documents her daily choreographies to question notions of linearity, consent, and privacy. The artist analyzes documentation and conservation as political acts, using symbolism and mythology to organize an environmental installation with lapses in conventions of time. Condina transforms the gallery space into a tableau of personal symbolism. Video performance and multimedia sculptures organize a language of cultural touchstones and communicate the innate voyeurism and passive consumption of our culture. Emphasizing the artist’s own lineage, the exhibition serves as both a self portrait and a mirror to how one is remembered and perceived.
CONDINA (b. 1988) is a Brooklyn, NY born and based Sicilian/Italian-American interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker working in land, performance, textile, ceramics, and painting. The artist’s practice utilizes duration, repetition, labor, and self-documentation to test the boundaries of the human condition. Employing themes of (re)birth, womanhood, and embodied memory, Condina organizes a dialogue between earth and body to explore humanity’s relationship with nature. The artist’s performance-based work was exhibited at the 2022 Venice Biennale, the Museum of Texas Tech University 2020 exhibition, Land Arts of the American West, among other international galleries.
LUCY TARQUINIO: Trendkill
24 April - 5 May 2024 | Opening Reception 7 -9 PM 24 April 2024
Beaconing from the darkness, fragments of words, objects, and memories intersect. Tethering language, representation, and abstraction, the line communicates an optical system of layers– an organized chaos of process. Exuding an aura of play and humor, the spotlighted paintings emphasize the process of processing, the process of painting, the process of committing into memory. Realizing her reality, Tarquinio’s elusive practice is rooted in the rigor of formalism, yet invites the intervention of absurd photo-material when the process becomes too systematic.
Hanging as tangible memories, Tarquinio’s innermost thoughts and experiences communicate through the breath of abstraction. Cheekily liaising with the viewer’s eye, this accumulation of studio choreographies manifest into an illegible language. Protected, the arranged layers form a shroud, and persist against the eye of the Spectacle. Subverting hyper visibility innate to painting, Tarquinio concocts a visual rabbit hole. Upon observation, the image-trained eye desperately bounces up and down, back and forth and, between layers searching for representational values– the more immersed, the more lost.
TARQUINIO, (b. 1999) a New York-based artist, obtained her BFA from Cooper Union in 2021. Exploring the line’s elusive role in representation, abstraction, and language, the artist’s process-based practice obscures ideas of familiarity, oscillating between literal and imagined. As an intervention to Tarquinio’s system, unique and absurd photo material inspires further exploration into the realm of abstraction. The finished product, skewed and abstracted into a chromatically layered composition, encrypts the trials and tribulations of the artist’s rigorous and intimate process. Tarquinio is a recent recipient of the 2023 Abbey Scholarship in Painting and 2022 Rolf G. Haerem Paint Award. The artist’s work has been shown internationally at the Fundacion Maceta, Mexico City, Mexico; Romanian Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy; The British School, Rome, Italy; among others.
LUCA REKOSH: Disjecta Membra at the Lido
9 - 19 May 2024 | Opening Reception 7 -9 PM 9 May 2024
With an interdisciplinary approach, Luca Rekosh will construct an environmental installation primarily of construction materials to expose, reference, and abstract the history of narrative and memory manipulation. Rekosh creates a paradoxical space to tremble where one is prompted to question the difference between manufactured and truth.
“Narrative, and the manipulation of it, is nothing new. It’s something that we both fear and admire. It’s something that we’ve done, and that will be done unto us because of belief, perspective, form, representation; we are drawing lines in an effort to record a trick of the light, a deviation of surface, the apparent contrast of one edge against another.
As time passes, our ability to produce, disturb, and manipulate nature grows. Look into our horizon lines, architecture, skylines, parks, beaches, and technology. The compositional manipulations of our environment act as visual cliffs that measure our mark on the world, as well as the extent of our imagination. Thinking about these tension points, I compose a scene using construction materials: cement, chicken wire, insulation foam which set designers also use to make arboreal or fleshy forms. Hinting at discarded trash on city beaches, buried or piled and distorting the surface, the large quantities of plastic also allude to a major moment in the history of the public’s exposure to the possibility of realistic, imaginary worlds: the invention of celluloid film.
As we approach a future in which imaginary images become more believable, one has to locate and trace a line to differentiate the innate, human, true, natural from the artificial. We have always had to rely on our judgment, sometimes despite what is being brought to light, and with the clarity of retrospect, to steady ourselves even when the horizon shifts.”
- Luca Rekosh
REKOSH (b. 2001) is a Romanian-American, Brooklyn-based artist. Born in Manhattan, the artist spent formative years in Budapest and New York City, returning to New York permanently in 2008. Informed by a life-long art education, Rekosh constructs multimedia sculptures that bridges geographies, mediums, and languages, exploring politics of accessibility in education and art environments. The artist graduated from Pratt Institute in 2023 with a BFA in Sculpture and Integrated Practices. Rekosh is a 2024 recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) for the FY2024 grant.
