The exhibition, there is spackle stuck in the outlet, is a series of visual-spatial interventions that celebrate, challenge and reimagine the politics of image-making. The exhibition presents Chicago-based artists Hope Wang and Ryan Goh, whose self-referential weavings and videos engage in the reconstruction of experience through the translation of architectural representations, and image as signifiers. Driven by our shared curiosity of the spaces we inhabit, the exhibition sets out to investigate how facade and image simultaneously both embody, obfuscate, and belie narrative and meaning.

Hope Wang provokes a destabilization of surface and its assumed material conditions by confounding the photographic image with woven structures of cloth. Through meticulous construction, the illusions between image and object establish tension between the ubiquity and specificity of industrial facades.

Ryan Goh’s work delves into the lapses between the promises and pitfalls of representation, questioning the limits of the construction of an image towards architectural mediations of vision and location, and probing the varying degrees of access, and authenticity in the enactment of narrative.

It is at the intersection of experiential understanding and cyclical reproduction of space that their individual perspectives align. Wang’s weavings depict reflections of pedestrians and shuttered storefronts, suggested through motifs like blue tape, brown paper, and spray painted surfaces that bar the viewer’s access to the realities that exist on the other side. Goh’s video work also implicates both viewer and artist through reflections and silhouettes, where he frames the gallery as both a surface and a space, and positions the body as a provisional subject. The artists’ explorations of architecture and space create contemplative pauses in the representation of narrative and meaning. These gestures engage our sense of place, both in claiming intimacy with disparate spaces, but also in probing the complexity of displaced positions and narratives.

Curator - Vidisha Aggarwal

Featuring - Hope Wang & Ryan Goh

Graphic Design - Yash Rastogi