HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce I’m moving to the reef (and other oceanic ways of forming radical relationships), an exhibition featuring sculptural works by New York-based artist Randi Renate, on view at the gallery’s Amagansett location as part of her month-long residency at HESSE FLATOW East.
Known for her ceramics and architectural structures whose tessellated patterns find affinities with nature, Renate reimagines through relationships of scale humanity’s connection with the environment as a means to encourage a greater ecological consciousness.
Inspired specifically by oceanic forms, the coral polyp is a recurring motif within the artist’s practice. Its unique ability to multiply from a monad into an expansive, integrated colony symbolizes for Renate a radical kind of body whose peripheries are malleable and porous with its surroundings. At the heart of her inquiry is a fantasy of losing one’s bodily edges, creating moments of immersion as if floating in water or a dissolution of the self in favor of the collective.
Undergoing a kind of submersion herself, Renate becomes absorbed in a meditative ritual as she hand-carves onto clay slabs as many as four hundred polyps across her surfaces. Focusing in on the singular unit signals a centripetal action, which Renate meets with a centrifugal output. In other works, ceramic tiles with curvilinear shapes are mosaicked in meandering trajectories suggesting infinite expandabilities. Of interest is how the human brain perceives in terms of gestalts - identifying or completing a whole from its discrete parts - and ways in which this may translate macroscopically across individuals and groups.
In I’m moving to the reef…, the material transformation of clay in the firing process from soft to hard alludes to calcifications in nature yielding internal structures of endoskeletons and exterior armors of seashells, both extensions of the body essential for an organism’s survival. White in color with reduction flashings of blue and pink glaze, her works exist in a fragile space between a bleached and healthy reef. Installed as a constellation around the room, they envelop the viewer, making it impossible to behold the exhibition at once in its entirety. This decentralization of any single point of view collapses a distance created through identification, making room for a plurality of positions, perspectives, and an interdependence beyond the self.
On the occasion of her exhibition, Renate will be in conversation with collaborating environmental artist and educator Beatriz Chachamovits along a guided a walk in nearby Indian Wells Beach on Friday August 2nd at 6pm. The event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP at info@hesseflatow.com
