September 8 - October 7, 2023
From Martha’s:
“Please join Martha’s in celebrating the opening of “Holometabolism” during a reception on Friday, September 8, 2023, from 6-9 PM at the gallery’s location on 4115 Guadalupe Street. The exhibition will remain open during regular business hours, 12-6 PM Friday through Saturday until October 7, and can also be viewed by appointment.
In their book A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari begin the chapter “How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs” with an illustration of the Dogon egg, an instance of the “world egg” or “cosmic egg,” a cosmogenic motif in which an egg begins the universe. Unlike the teleology implied by “beginning,” however, Deleuze and Guattari write that the “egg is not regressive; on the contrary, it is perfectly contemporary, you always carry it with you as your own milieu of experimentation, your associated milieu.” In other words, neither the chicken nor the egg comes first; they are contemporaries, traveling alongside one another. You are and are with your egg.
“Holometabolism,” curated by Mimi Bowman and featuring the work of Isabel Legate and Oshay Green, evokes the form of the egg. Obvious in the oval silk wall works by Legate, the egg also makes an appearance in the tall, seemingly rigid structures by Green. According to the myth, the Dogon egg is crossed by a series of vibrations, a series which transmutes the egg, enabling it to give birth to the universe. Green’s structures are likewise crossed by vibrations: a speaker within one vibrates the tower, making us aware that the steel that comprises it, solid as it may seem, is actually made up of myriad tiny parts, molecules, each shimmering in their own space. The awareness of this ends the heretofore dichotomy between the steel of Green’s work and silk of Legate’s work—one hard, one soft—as both are revealed as simply matter in metamorphosis.
-Exhibition text by Grace Sparapani”
4115 Guadalupe Street
Austin, 78751 Texas
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