Out of the Woods

Carbon 12 is pleased to announce a group exhibition with works from artists Sarah Almehairi, Olaf Breuning, Gil Heitor Cortesão, Monika Grabuschnigg, Amir Khojasteh, Philip Mueller, Anahita Razmi and Amba Sayal-Bennett

Days have passed, spent observing the outside from within the pristine interior of Gil Heitor Cortesão’s painting, to other days, as in Monika Grabuschnigg’s drawings, spent contemplating relationships in highly digitalized societies.

Moving forward from weeks of isolation, countries worldwide slowly sputter to life once more, as a newfound normal slowly begins to settle in place. The exhibition, Out of the Woods, encompasses a longing for the return of the familiar.

While the collective body of work heavily emphasizes the individual practices and varying media of these artists, there is a strong significance to concepts of form and structure, such as in Sarah Almehairi’s wooden work, that observes processes of assembling and reassembling to create and form meaning, and in Amba Sayal-Bennett’s mild steel sculpture, which explores how phenomenological experiences can be reduced to the basic terms of line, color and shape.

Upon the reappearance of some semblance of normal, world issues still remain: in Olaf Breuning’s woodcut painting, he delves into urgent matters of global warming and rapid climate change, while in Amir Khojasteh’s series of works, he manipulates drawing as a form of non-restrictive media, to contrast imposing purposes of political propaganda.

In Anahita Razmi’s work, she considers the implication of scripted television narratives in relation to Eastern cultures and politics. The word projected on the LED ticker display reads KISMET, meaning ‘destiny’; referring to a soap opera's impossibility to ever end, doomed to the perpetual cliffhanger. 

As though in response to this sombre realisation, Philip Mueller conveys a character smoking a cigarette in indifference; yearning for elsewhere in this time of uncertainty, for a far away diversion, such as Tiberio Beach Resort, the fictional beach resort within Mueller’s expansive, imagined universe. With a nod to its title, The Fail, the works reflect on contemplations of now: on the destiny of today, tomorrow, and what ever else should come after.