To close a small distance

To close a small distance presents new work by two artists who investigate what is both sensible and near. Addressing a world in which knowledge, experience, and sociality are increasingly oriented towards the virtual, this exhibition offers transdisciplinary perspectives on our entanglement with the material world.

Leeza Negelev’s gestural marks mine the space between established aesthetic ideals and the responsiveness of her materials. To understand this threshold, her new work leans on the language of music. She explores the way our experience with a painting can be time-bound, relational, and singular through an installation that serves as a graphic score, up close and from a distance.

Katie Kearns’ sculptures begin with an interest in domestic objects and spaces. They disrupt the quiet familiarity of an old chair or dresser through surrealist interventions–alluding to the symbiotic way objects appear to absorb memory, as well as the fluidity of queer experience. In doing so, their work invites the viewer to question their own relationship to material, memory, and selfhood.

Expanding on these themes, the exhibition will feature multiple site-specific music performances that investigate the relational and material elements of sound through alternative tuning systems, acoustic and digital sonic landscapes, and works that rely on proximity and distance.