julia dahee hong mathias mu arnaud eubelen justin somjen
TRANSCRIPT
Julia Dahee HongArnaud EubelenJustine Grillet
Mathias MUJustin SomjenFinn Theuws
Gather Like Dust presents Gather Like Dust presents
Julia Dahee Hong 1 Serving Suggestions 2019 - PVC banner unique metal s-hooks
Arnaud Eubelen 2 Mass Appeal (Wall sound panel) 2021 - burned wood panel, vibrating speaker system, bulb, beer bottle, steel
3 Observatory (3 rotating seat bench) 2021 - concrete, steel grid, wood, bended steel tube, street dust, epoxy, led light, uv burned polycarbonate
4 Station (wine fountain) 2019 - Cellular concrete, steel tube, wine bottle, plexiglass, led tube, tap
Justine Grillet 5 Abyss 2020-21 - steel, epoxy, led display
Mathias MU 6 ASRAi 2021 - 3D printed PLA, steel
7 EPSILON 2021 - 3D printed PLA, steel
Justin Somjen 8 The Brutal Garden (series) 2021 - plaster, wood, acrylic paint
Finn Theuws 9 Cugini Calligaro 2021 - clay
10 </3 2021 - barbed wire, Sarracenia Judith (pitcher plant)
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Floorplan
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basement
courtyard
private
street entrance
expo space
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2 3 4
expo entrance
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Gather Like Dust
The artist as a midnight cleaner. Dust might be everywhere, neither near nor far. Whenever you enter a space, dust will find its way. Even if nobody wants it, everybody knows it is there.
Gather alludes to something which has a vast, decisive, and preordained goal, whereas dust indicates an open, unanswered, undecided structure. Gather Like Dust refers to the act of converging something which, in its essence, can not be reduced to this type of rational act. Something which is almost too diffuse, too relentless and too incoherent to be led by the seducing charm of gathering.
Yet we gather here the idea of dust, as being something that is defined by non-dust, by the space between these separate particles. This distance creates the openness to re-approach these elements and let them co-exist once more. In such, the artistic practice, as well as the act of exhibiting and spectating is like gathering dust, redefining the world, rethinking our reality.
Gather Like Dust is a group show with works by Justin Somjen, Finn Theuws, Arnaud Eubelen, Mathias MU, Julia Dahee Hong and Justine Grillet.
The exhibition was brought together by the Antwerp collective, BOX22, and the Brussels collective, Medusa. Both are led by a young team of artists and curators. The collaboration instigated out of a remarkable parallel, both collectives being nomadic off-spaces that look to create and provoke a new perception on contemporary art by using exhibitions as a medium in itself and by intensively collaborating with artists. When these two collectives found each other they brought together six artists, to gather them like dust.
Lina Ejdaa
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Julia Dahee Hong
Julia Dahee Hongâs multidisciplinary practice questions values of socially inherited and culturally specific forms by referencing notions of service, emotional labour, and aspirations. By looking into figurations of labour, Hongâs work dissolves sugar-coated expectations and scrutinises the cycles of automated serviceability and emotional labour condensed within novel economic structures. By assessing and repurposing the symbols of the service economy, Hong casts a wide net around the influence of middle-class aspirations and the tertiary sector at large.
For âGather Like Dustâ Julia presents her work Serving Suggestions, magnified photographic scans of SPAM (a brand of canned cooked pork made by Hormel Foods Corporation, first introduced in 1937 and gained popularity worldwide after its use during World War II), suspended on handmade S-hooks, also known as Vleeshaak (meat hooks) used by butchers.
Hong (1992 Vancouver, CAN) is a Canadian artist currently based in Antwerp. Hong is the organizer of âBreakfast B Reading Seriesâ, which invites a handful of artists and writers to read/perform their own works while serving as a platform for sharing writing, active listening, and community building. She was an artist-in-residence for STRT Kit (2020) at AAIR, received her MFA from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (2019) and BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2015) in Vancouver, Canada.
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ArnaudEubelen
âDemocracy always works against the pacification of social disturbance, against the management of consensus and stability. !e challenge for democracy is not to formulate agreements or maintain order, but to invent new and hitherto unauthorized modes of disaggregation, disagreement and disorder.â
Peter Hallward, âJacques Ranciere and the Subversion of Masteryâ, Paragraph, Vol.XXVIII, n.1, 2005, p34-35
Arnaud Eubelen (1991 LiĂšge, BE) works in the no-manâs land between sculpture and design, questioning our assumptions leading from concepts to objects and the measure to which construction material are taken for granted, re-appropriating and re-valuing the various industrial building-stones of our world by shifting their use and context to highlight the intrinsic qualities and values.
By sensibly re-wiring and re-writing the urban context that surrounds us through different material layers with their own narratives and lives, he views the streets of our man-made world we live in as hardware stores or a âmatĂ©riothequeâ as he puts it.
Through the realization of supposedly day to day objects of use with his distinctively different approach, deliberately disrespecting the established codes towards materials and their intended use, his practice leads to a body of works pertaining to the world of design but build from repurposed industrial redundancies, creating unique objects with particular identities bridging gaps between art and luxury to the industrialized world.
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JustineGrillet
âBy its end all of the Dinosaurs were dead.
All except me -Qfwfq corrected- because, for a certain period, I was also a Dinosaur: about fifty million years, Iâd say, and I donât regret it; if you were a Dinosaur in those days, you were sure you were in the right, and you made everyone look up to you.â
Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics, 1968
A mysterious non physicality creates my interest for mythical creatures and its surroundings. Yes, I consider a Dinosaur to be a mythical creature.
What we know about them is the same as what we know about these creatures. They feel to mysterious to ever have been existed,and millions of years ago feels the same as a fictive story to me.
Although, a theory from a fictive story can be considered as the truth.
A playground where the rules can be set by anyone.
Things that donât exist physically are easier to espouse. There is no right or wrong.
Itâs a fictive story with no comparison to the ârealâ, physical thing of it, these non rules create a feeling of endless freedom.
The creatures, nonmonsters, who changed shape and became monsters are self-sufficient under one condition, they need to be activated.
The activation happens at indefinite moments.
Justine Grillet (1998 Antwerp, BE) 9
Mathias MU
Mathias MU (1991 Antwerp, BE)
ASRAi
MATHIAS MU
aquatic fairy - pond demon - water Sprite
1991
2021
ASRAi ver. 1NFT (Non Fungable Token)
0xED66874887e9a6016E9B9ceD05F256736977d08B
EPSILON ep, OBSTRUCT ; zil, MAKE EDGES ; onom, WHIRLWIND.
MATHIAS MU 1991
2021
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EPSILON ver. 1 & 2NFT (Non Fungable Token)
0.200 ETH0xED66874887e9a6016E9B9ceD05F256736977d08B
USE OF THE TERM EPSILON OR Δ
In engineering mechanics, strain calculation Δ = increase of length. Usually this relates to testing of metallic materials.
In mathematics, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted Δ.
In computer science, it often represents the empty string. The machine epsilon indicates the upper bound on the relative error due to rounding in floating point arithmetic.
In physics, it indicates the permittivity of a medium; with the subscript 0 (Δ0) it is the permittivity of free space.
In statistics, it is used to refer to error terms.
In agronomy, it is used to represent the âphotosynthetic efficiencyâ of a particular plant or crop.
(Source: The lost continent of MU by James Churchward)
JustinSomjen
Justin Somjen (1992 Vancouver, CAN) is a Canadian visual artist living in Brussels. His practice stems from a deep rooted engagement with photography and image-based media, using the medium as an entry point into various topics and contexts. He uses photography in many non-traditional ways, often not using images at all, rather using photography as an anchor to begin to explore, bend, and de-rationalize the truths and foundations of what defines an image. Often, he uses photography mixed with sculpture and pushes it into 3-dimensional space. By playing in this area, his work additionally unpacks themes of protection, identity, and the relationship between natural systems and humans. He has exhibited throughout Canada and Belgium, and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Photography from Ryerson University in Toronto and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Sculpture from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp.
The Brutal Garden // Its been a long time // jâattendais ça avec impatience // I am ready to do something // Deux ans dâimmobilitĂ© se transforment en feu // Je nâai plus besoin de me protĂ©ger // 7 sentinels protect their keep // la partie la plus protĂ©gĂ©e du chĂąteau // A castle so reinforced its been protected for hundreds of years // Miles away, by an ephemeral pond, 7 fleurs fleurissent et remplissent lâair de pollen // Stems, branches, spikes, thorns, petals // Some months later, the castle will be overtaken // et lâĂ©tang deviendra sec et gĂšlera en hiver // Les gens qui ont renversĂ© le chĂąteau commencent une rĂ©volution // and the flowers will be dormant until the next spring // April showers bring May flowers // En mai fait ce quâil te plait //
Justin Somjenâs recent work takes the form of relief sculptures depicting floral patterns reminiscent of decorative baroque architecture. Adorned with sharp frames inspired by plant spikes and protective fencing, the work is emblematic of protection in a larger context. The works display sculptural images of mechanical and chemical plant protection; poisonous plants, thorns and spikes. By taking inspiration from plants and how they use simple bio-chemical/ mechanical tools to repel or kill their predators, the intention is to reflect how we, also, protect ourselves from external forces. Using architectural motifs as a direct parallel to these plant systems, the seven sculptures combine plant forms and architectural forms together in a subtly recognizable way. Each piece is a sentinel adorned in decorative spikes
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FinnTheuws
!e goal was not so much to record oneâs own stories as much as it was to write oneself into existence by exploring oneâs connections to others, âŠ,by weaving their own names, and those of friends and lovers, into their own work.â
Alex Kitnick, âI, etceteraâ
The work of Finn Theuws (1997 Amsterdam, NL) presents a visual language of archiving and translating elements of memories based on the dynamic of previous intimate relationships. This is realized by materializing shared moments into various media such as sculpture, drawing or writing.
The works do not have therapeutic goals, but aim to cultivate, relive or preserve the experiences; as he believes these specific memories were in particular palpable.
The objects research the social constructs and the complexity of contemporary masculinity and intimacy.
For the âGather Like Dustâ exhibition he used ready-made artifacts, which are specifically referring back to the indicated memories, as tools to formalize the ongoing visual archive representing the shared moments.
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Duinstraat 1242060 Antwerp