The Antenna Show
The Antenna Show
September 19 - November 27, 2024
The Antenna Show
September 19 - November 27, 2024
Emily Cheng, larí garcía, Iva Kinnaird, Umico Niwa, and Sarah Pettitt
Laura (the gallery)
1125 E 11th St, Houston, TX
Laura is pleased to present our fall group exhibition, The Antenna Show. The Antenna Show is about frequencies, feelers, and feelings. The exhibition's works of art channel the acute sensitivity of antennae, framing them as conduits for perception and energy. The works of Emily Cheng, larí garcía, Iva Kinnaird, Umico Niwa, and Sarah Pettitt not only receive signals, as antennae do, but dispatch them. Thus, the works of art together become an array of conductors that participate in cycles of sensation and transmission. These five artists respectively tune into spiritual, paranormal, insectoid, and botanical frequencies.
Emily Cheng’s paintings and drawings feature elaborate designs—often oriented around a mandala form—that evoke spirituality and mysticism. She encodes the circular structures with natural imagery and vibrant, abstract patterns, many of which allude to Eastern spiritual and aesthetic traditions. In her 1985 painting, Maine, two white orbs appear to levitate, conjuring crystal balls and visions. Her works call to mind the sacred geometries and spiritual nature of Hilma af Klint’s automatic painting. The humming frequencies in her painting lend a pitch as clear as a tuning fork, reaching out into the space to connect with or intercept approaching bodies.
larí garcía’s practice reflects on precariousness, grief, and loss within the context of mysticism and ghostly matters. It offers a multitude of interpretations involving illusion, allegory, value, belief, and contemporary life itself. The specter of the “unseen” becomes an essential player in sites marked by loss. Often, the sculptural work garcía creates is site-responsive. garcía’s untitled periphery is thus a trap for the unseen. Their contemporary adaptations of traditional tools become temporary interventions to halt hauntings within a space while initiating communication with spirits.
Iva Kinnaird’s tie-dye and candy-striped cockroaches, with their ostentatious feelers, playfully wink at you from their perch on the wall. Vibrantly hued and painstakingly collected, painted, and cared for, their carcasses transform into beautiful peacocks of the insect world. Iva’s Jumping Jack Cockroach sculpture takes the humor a step further, by turning an otherwise despised pest into a joyful activity. Kinnaird’s sculptures are an uncanny delight, and a nod to the gallery’s history, as the location of Bill’s Junk, where Kinnaird herself used to work.
Umico Niwa combines organic and synthetic materials to create hybrid creatures that resist normative classification systems. Tiny anthropomorphic beings, dubbed Daphnes, animate the gallery. Formed from foraged plant matter, these miniature, nymph-like creatures colonize nooks of the gallery. The Daphne series spins across spheres of ancient mythology, fable, paganism, natural folklore and contemporary fantasy, fluttering from one reference to the next.
Across a blue expanse, Sarah Pettitt’s Untitled painting offers a lone antenna, which grasps a single feather, floating a few inches from the canvas surface. The work creates a tension between painted image and object, and suggests that the painting can become a conduit beyond the picture plane to the physical world. Tentatively exploring form, color, and pain Pettitt layers fragments from everyday life with historical and material research.
