On view until August 20, 2022 at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York, the exhibition “everything slackens in a wreck“, curated by Andil Gosine, proposes an analogy of destruction that highlights imperialism and the annihilation that follows, but also repeats what the exhibition curator calls the “demolition work” of underappreciated or marginalized groups of people who respond to this obliteration with art that conceives of its own kinds of rebellious demands, offering dreams of substitution of presence and competition, possible and therefore conceivable.
Highlighting works by four artists with a shared diasporic heritage, “everything slackens in a wreck“, is the primary exhibition presented in the Ford Foundation Gallery space since its closure in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The exhibition “everything slackens in a wreck” features artists Margaret Chen, Andrea Chung, Wendy Nanan and Kelly Sinnapah Mary. Four women who share the common heritage of a study program on these Asian travelers to the Americas and elsewhere to work in fields after the annulment of servitude. They also share a playful and unsettling way of approaching this set of experiences in the afterlife, joining and reconsidering the objects and images associated with it.
The exhibition presents how their creative cycles reflect their own ongoing excursions of development and repetition, as well as those of their families, as complex characters consolidate and progress.
Using paint, paper mache, and salvaged objects such as wood and shells, the artists transform humble materials into unpredictable structures and blend animals both plant and human, connecting the innate inventiveness of the ordinary world to the versatile practices used by transients to cope and thrive.
These works will be accompanied by Jahajee, a soundscape in the nursery made from sounds presented by members of the local New York-based Jahajee Sisters, in light of the questions posed : what gives you pleasure? What brings you comfort?