Dreamsong’s presentation at the Armory features Minneapolis-based artists Alexa Horochowski and David Goldes.
Raised in the city of Comodoro Rivadavia in Patagonia, Argentina, Alexa Horochowski draws copiously from the natural world to explore how political upheaval and man-made climate change reshape the temporal construction of memory and meaning. Dreamsong’s booth will feature Naturaleza Muerta Con Una Liebre (Still Life With A Hare) (2023), a years-long work-in-progress that will debut at the Armory. Drawing from classical still life painting, specifically Jan Weenix’s hunting scenes and the comparatively austere pantry paintings of Juan Sanchez Cotán, Naturaleza Muerta adopts the memento mori tradition.
Rooted in a childhood event, when Horochowski’s mother skinned, cooked, and served a hare for a campsite dinner after it was inadvertently hit and killed by the family’s car, the work also alludes to the use of the Patagonia region as a detention site where dissidents were “disappeared” during Argentina’s dirty war. Horochowski’s skinned hare summons memory, family, violence, art history, and the land into a convergence of meaning and narrative that echoes across multiple temporal scales.
Similarly interested in transforming materials to reflect the instability of our increasingly complex world, David Goldes uses graphite as a conduit and electrifies drawings to produce mysterious trajectories of burnt edges and voids while inviting chemical reactions to tarnish areas of silver leaf with metallic tones of yellow, orange, green, and blue. The social upheaval of the global pandemic brought the artist’s prior epidemiological training to the forefront, leading him to explore the relational dynamics of cellular and biomorphic forms in his compositions, and to seek metaphorical meaning in representations of infection, protection, isolation, and touch. Recent and new drawings will be presented.
