formerly: Rubber Factory
full archive here
full archive here
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 fused glass works in the exhibition are back-lit by the windows in the gallery overlooking the Bowery, where the current of sights and sounds from the streets are refracted within Shuyi’s fragmented, translucent pieces. In contrast, in the work “Recursive Wanderings I”, the tensions and fractures within the glass works are illuminated by a back-lit image reminiscent of geodes, cell membranes, aerial landscapes, and primordial fossils. This image is co-created with a deep-learning neural network trained on a handmade dataset derived from the Shuyi’'s material research and text prompts, envisioning a speculative hybrid ecosystem where indefinable life forms evolve along diverse paths.
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 fused glass works in the exhibition are back-lit by the windows in the gallery overlooking the Bowery, where the current of sights and sounds from the streets are refracted within Shuyi’s fragmented, translucent pieces. In contrast, in the work “Recursive Wanderings I”, the tensions and fractures within the glass works are illuminated by a back-lit image reminiscent of geodes, cell membranes, aerial landscapes, and primordial fossils. This image is co-created with a deep-learning neural network trained on a handmade dataset derived from the Shuyi’'s material research and text prompts, envisioning a speculative hybrid ecosystem where indefinable life forms evolve along diverse paths.
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.