formerly: Rubber Factory
full archive here
full archive here
upcoming 10-25-2024 to 12-21-2024
Alex Callender, night grass
Shuyi Cao, and when the sea was open
reception from 6 to 8 pm
Alex Callender, night grass
Shuyi Cao, and when the sea was open
reception from 6 to 8 pm
and when the sea was open
Shuyi Cao
October 25 – December 21, 2024
island gallery is pleased to announce and when the sea was open, a new solo exhibition by Shuyi Cao.
The exhibition contemplates diasporic matters and discontinuous landscapes, through poetic and intimate approaches to materiality. The standing and hanging sculptures Xenophora I & II are crafted with idiosyncratic materials such as shell fragments, driftwood, beach glass and mineral conglomerates, collected from various shorelines in New York and Quebec along the St. Lawrence River. The gesture of assemblage references Xenophora (meaning “bearing foreigners”), a genus of marine gastropod molluscs that attach stones, bits of coral, and dead shells to their outer surface. These residues from the evolving past and present between land and sea, blossom into speculative fossils, as the carrier of innumerable temporalities.
Recursive Wanderings emerges from the precarious coalition of waste glasses with unidentifiable origins, gathered along the shorelines of North America and the artist’s homesea in Asia. Each of these found glass embodies a story of its creation and migration trajectory. When subjected to the heating and cooling temperatures of the kiln, the glasses expand and contract at varying rates, resulting in cracks that outline the incompatibility. These ongoing processes of fracturing are accentuated in the installation as microcosms of the inhuman forces, resembling unconformities during geological processes - both a seam and a rupture, revealing holes in times and places, that are also fissures in memories, senses and understanding.
The exhibition contemplates diasporic matters and discontinuous landscapes, through poetic and intimate approaches to materiality. The standing and hanging sculptures Xenophora I & II are crafted with idiosyncratic materials such as shell fragments, driftwood, beach glass and mineral conglomerates, collected from various shorelines in New York and Quebec along the St. Lawrence River. The gesture of assemblage references Xenophora (meaning “bearing foreigners”), a genus of marine gastropod molluscs that attach stones, bits of coral, and dead shells to their outer surface. These residues from the evolving past and present between land and sea, blossom into speculative fossils, as the carrier of innumerable temporalities.
Recursive Wanderings emerges from the precarious coalition of waste glasses with unidentifiable origins, gathered along the shorelines of North America and the artist’s homesea in Asia. Each of these found glass embodies a story of its creation and migration trajectory. When subjected to the heating and cooling temperatures of the kiln, the glasses expand and contract at varying rates, resulting in cracks that outline the incompatibility. These ongoing processes of fracturing are accentuated in the installation as microcosms of the inhuman forces, resembling unconformities during geological processes - both a seam and a rupture, revealing holes in times and places, that are also fissures in memories, senses and understanding.
Shuyi Cao is a New York-based artist whose practice explores alchemical approaches to material, matter and knowledge osmosis. Through archeological speculation and ecological fiction, she contemplates the porous plurality of relations between sciences, technocultures, mythologies, and cosmologies. Combining hand-crafted objects, technological artifacts, and moving images, she creates paradoxical fossils - tangible and intangible - as portals to meditate geotrauma, transcorporeal ecology and prehistoric futurity. Her work has been shown internationally, including recent solo show “Ardor for Unconformity” (2024) at 11th Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine, Quebec, “Undercurrent Softness” (2023) at Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai, duo show “Strange Stranger” (2023) at Para Site, Hong Kong; and group exhibitions at acclaimed institutions, such as He Art Museum, Foshan (2023), TAG Museum (Qingdao), Aranya Art Centre, Beidaihe (2023), Hyundai Motorstudio, Beijing (2023), Chronus Art Centre, Shanghai (2022), Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai (2021), Today Art Museum, Beijing (2021), NARS Foundation, New York (2021). She is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute and founder of Transmaterial Lab, and held position as artist-in-residency at Guangdong Times Museum, New Museum NEW INC, Power Station of Art, The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. She received a Bachelor of Laws, an M.A. in Public Administration from Fudan University in Shanghai, and an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design, New York.