TEXT:

Knockdown Center is pleased to present A Continuous Stream of Occurrence, an exhibition that brings together the works of Luba Drozd and William Lamson to explore how time manifests in natural and physical phenomena. The exhibition features site-specific and time-based works that modify Knockdown Center’s gallery space into an uncertain laboratory, where architecture, light, piano cord, copper, salts, and glass create an environment that unveils time as materially constructed. By focusing on sound and vibration, or on crystallization and geological transformation, the exhibition encourages visitors to experience the sensory elements that make up these evolutionary systems.

The works of Drozd and Lamson uniquely combine a perspective on artistic and ecological issues, bringing forward questions related to the generation of events, the interaction of materials and the organization of environments. Both artists have developed practices bridging art, history, and science to address the ways systems influence creativity. Their work is an expression of possibility, a presentation of reality influenced by ecological thinking, that sees any circumstance as networked and evolving. The title of the exhibition is from Alfred North Whitehead, one of the key figures in studying the relational and processual character of nature.

Drozd’s Repeat Until the End is a sound installation that materializes vibration and creates a dialogue with the historical industrial architecture of Knockdown Center. Using metal, glass, piano chords, and cinematics, her installation creates an evolving atmosphere that is at times captivating and eerie. Lamson’s Badwater is part of a larger project, where the artist sets material parameters for a microclimate to emerge. Components including humidifiers, pumps, minerals, and glass form a complex adaptive system as a sprawling and unpredictable installation. These different entities are continuously interacting and adapting to their own behavior thus enveloping the viewer into this ecosystem as it emerges.

Drozd’s and Lamson’s works engage the public in a compositional understanding of nature, that influences artistic practices and exhibition-making turning them like test sites for the articulation of ecological challenges. A Continuous Stream of Occurrence is curated by XP the curatorial signature of Xavier Acarín and Park Myers.

PROGRAM:

A sound intervention by Roarke Menzies took place at the exhibition’s closing reception.

Click here to read an interview between the curators