Maryam Hoseini
This End the Sun is a collaborative exhibition by artists Maryam Hoseini, Rindon Johnson, and Jordan Strafer, created specifically for the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery.
As a starting point for their collaboration, the artists cowrote a text reflecting on ideas of interrelation and the changeable qualities of time, told from the perspective of a collective “we.”
The artists write:
How is time altered on the way down? Are we free as we are? Are we in any degree bound by our appetites? Are we at all in bondage to the opinion of our neighbors, to the customs and notions of the society, however harmful or absurd? Can we see things as they are, as they should be?
No ground here! We are no longer grounded, we group-thought. We got altered on the way down. 1: broken horizon, 0: binary reversal. Do we tell stories as they are, as they should be? (Why the same over and over again?) 3: We invite you to touch it (it as in the rock).
Inspired by the view through the Lobby Gallery skylights, the artists have designed a computer program that performs a prediction, constructing an ongoing speculative simulation of the sky overhead as it maneuvers between day and night. As with the title of the exhibition, the artists consider ideas of perspective in representation, probing the desire to control, frame, and capture. In addition to the projection, the exhibition includes new paintings by Hoseini, stone furniture by Johnson, and a video by Strafer, all of which were created specifically for this presentation.
The paintings by Maryam Hoseini were created specifically for this presentation and reflect on the relationships between perspective, power and desire. Her paintings are constructed on shaped wooden panels, containing sections with consecutive apertures inspired by the arrowslit- a vertical opening in a fortification common in Medieval castles through which an archer could aim an arrow. They are also reminiscent of window blinds, prison bars, or peepholes, narrow openings that denote positions of power, voyeurism, or captivity. Perspectival shifts occur within the paintings themselves, as rooms, frames, landscapes, skies, borders, and bodies seem to blend, overlap, and defy gravity. The motif of a sphere captured within a floating frame recurs throughout these works- moons or suns heralding worlds beyond the rectilinear margins that contain them. Hoseini's rich blue hues evoke multiple times of day, sky, and sea, interior and exterior.
This exhibition is curated by Margot Norton, Allen and Lola Goldring Curator.
