ARTISTS
Aidan Koch and Dawit L. Petros: In Search Of
Transmitter is pleased to present In Search Of, an exhibition pairing the work of Aidan Koch and Dawit L. Petros, two artists who, despite their disparate media, take related approaches to pictorial space in order to create open-ended narratives, notable as much for the space within them as for the connections between different moments. Taking its title from Bas Jan Ader's In Search of the Miraculous, this exhibition considers these artists' work in terms of questions and histories of migration, and the search, whether for the sublime or for survival, which underlies human movement. In addressing these issues, Koch and Petros both make significant use of abstraction, and range in their interests from a mythological past to the factual present, and beyond, to the possible future.
The comics and sculpture of Aidan Koch consider migration in terms of both ancient mythology and ambiguously dystopian future. One of these narratives follows Leto, daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe of Greek mythology, as she travels through ancient Lycia seeking water for her children Artemis and Apollo. In this work, part of a large commission project by Margaret Tolbert called Proje Su / Springs Project, Koch uses abstraction to both undercut the linearity of narrative and to emphasize her characters' subjectivity. Abstraction plays a similar role in selections from a current story in progress, in which fields of vivid color punctuate and give structure to moments in the life of a people living in the aftermath of an unspecified drastic change.
The photographs of Dawit L. Petros depict people in transition, either at such a distance that they become elements of landscape or, as in A series of complicated ambivalences, Bamako, Mali, cropped so close as to render them individually unidentifiable, icons of movement simultaneously entering and exiting the frame of the photograph. In Act of Recovery (Part I), Nouakchott, Mauritania, a group of people gather around a beached ship, the monumentality of the image reflecting the ship's stasis. It's unclear just what the recovery of the title refers to; is the ship being recovered by the people or the sea? Yet in this uncertainty, we also see a a rare moment of rest, regardless of whether it occurs in the wake of catastrophe or in advance of work still to be done.
Transmitter is pleased to present In Search Of, an exhibition pairing the work of Aidan Koch and Dawit L. Petros, two artists who, despite their disparate media, take related approaches to pictorial space in order to create open-ended narratives, notable as much for the space within them as for the connections between different moments. Taking its title from Bas Jan Ader's In Search of the Miraculous, this exhibition considers these artists' work in terms of questions and histories of migration, and the search, whether for the sublime or for survival, which underlies human movement. In addressing these issues, Koch and Petros both make significant use of abstraction, and range in their interests from a mythological past to the factual present, and beyond, to the possible future.
The comics and sculpture of Aidan Koch consider migration in terms of both ancient mythology and ambiguously dystopian future. One of these narratives follows Leto, daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe of Greek mythology, as she travels through ancient Lycia seeking water for her children Artemis and Apollo. In this work, part of a large commission project by Margaret Tolbert called Proje Su / Springs Project, Koch uses abstraction to both undercut the linearity of narrative and to emphasize her characters' subjectivity. Abstraction plays a similar role in selections from a current story in progress, in which fields of vivid color punctuate and give structure to moments in the life of a people living in the aftermath of an unspecified drastic change.
The photographs of Dawit L. Petros depict people in transition, either at such a distance that they become elements of landscape or, as in A series of complicated ambivalences, Bamako, Mali, cropped so close as to render them individually unidentifiable, icons of movement simultaneously entering and exiting the frame of the photograph. In Act of Recovery (Part I), Nouakchott, Mauritania, a group of people gather around a beached ship, the monumentality of the image reflecting the ship's stasis. It's unclear just what the recovery of the title refers to; is the ship being recovered by the people or the sea? Yet in this uncertainty, we also see a a rare moment of rest, regardless of whether it occurs in the wake of catastrophe or in advance of work still to be done.
Artists on show
Contact details
