Skroderider includes artists Joseph Buckley, Sara Enrico, Erin Johnson and Viola Yesiltac. The show’s works address material choices, particularly the porous authorial boundaries of material intention.
The title of the show references the sessile plants who become mobile among the plethora of protagonists in Vernor Vinge’s space opera A Fire Upon the Deep, 1992. A trickster intelligence gives the flora long term memory, the consequences of which rebound capriciously through the story’s universe. Once this species become both mobile and conscious of history, will, evolution, and chance, the distinctions between plant and animal, individual and collective action, begin to blur. By the story’s end, we distrust the sophont that enabled such a transformation.
Skroderider’s four exhibiting artists similarly, through material choices, employ such a catalytic storytelling, upending expectations for a surface or character. Joseph Buckley promotes the Orc from an evil role to that of surplus labor employed as modular furniture components, perniciously extra. To Sara Enrico, fabric, be it silk, canvas or neoprene, is multidimensional, becoming time-based when the gravity of bronze and oil paint weigh its surfaces. Viola Yesiltac’s pleather absorbs the boundaries of a seemingly prehistoric spread of ink the wandering of which is eulogized in adjacent photography navigating Istanbul, once a continental gateway, now a fluid border. Erin Johnson substantiates the non-binary, tempering the speed of the hothouse with the incantation of the chorus, praying empiricism catches up with the multiple ways fruit is born.
