CARVALHO PARK enters its second year of programming with the opening of Sonnets of the Subconscious, featuring Brooklyn-based artist Krista Louise Smith and Istanbul + London-based artist Merve Işeri. The uncertainties of now impel a retreat to interior spaces. The works in this exhibition follow the topographies of dreams, considering the body’s abstract presence – both restricted and fluid – in these preferred, temporal spaces. Prompted by inner necessity, Işeri’s and Smith’s paintings privilege experience over interpretation, by way of openness over preconception. Sonnets of the Subconscious is on view until March 15, 2020.

KRISTA LOUISE SMITH

There is a feeling of suspension among the assembly of clouds. Smith offers escapism – and no attachment to earth – suggesting for the viewer abundant space above and below, to levitate among the clouds. Her palette drips through the senses – pale pinks like those of a milkshake, clouds like a dollop of French cream. This milky color scheme is soft and tranquil, tightly nuanced with slight variations that completely absorb one’s gaze, physically imparting a feeling of being soothed and cooled. The colors of Blue Dream are the most saturated, here a blue of Renaissance heavens.

Syntheses of dream and identity, the work’s content is that of lightness by way of catharsis. Constellations of Arpian forms lend an eternal state of buoyancy – floating organoid shapes with womblike associations, to that of beginnings. A naivety is palpably authentic. After years of suffering from an inflamed nerve running down her right arm, the artist began working with her non-dominant hand. Set among veils of semi-transparent oils, her drawn lines are absent of judgment or self-consciousness – in the artist’s words :: “close to something my inner child would not likely question.” Made as a means to heal, the work is of infinite and infectious lightness. It is a mediation on the quieting divinity that can come from surrender. As a viewer in the parallel plane of the work, the physical, emotional and spiritual experiences are all on equal levels.

Dominating the central space of the gallery is a monumental installation of 680 ceramic teeth sculpted by Smith. Diligently untangled from the subconscious and presented as a sublime army, the works extend twenty-four feet down the gallery’s main space. Here is a monument to nightmares, the irrational anxieties that abruptly disrupt the dreamscape.

MERVE IŞERI

A singular gesture can carry an entire experience. İşeri’s work is of a language of inner vision – fluid, open and direct. While İşeri is palpably present in every line and mark, her work evades fixity and meaning. While a dance occurs between signifier and signified, inner and outer worlds are never in opposition – a pervasive symbiosis marries every line and form within an open field of possibilities.

İşeri’s voids speak of realms as she manages to transform the two-dimensional canvas into an inter-dimensional space. Her distilled line travels through these ambiguous environments. In one painting, it reads as a vein, circulating, defining and sustaining a biomorphic form. In another, the same line desires to be known as a cloud, untouched and not knowing any confines.

In the exceptional work Intersensory, İşeri connects a constellation of ameba-like forms with the tip of her finger, infusing each vivid pigment pool with life as she carries an electrical charge from one to the next. Each, like the relationship of our body’s senses, is now aware of the other. It may also speak to the collective body, the interconnectivity of people. As Iseri interlaces the interior and exterior, an innate, hyper-awareness materializes, but it also reveals the dialectical relationship between the two – that what takes place in the subconscious is mirrored on the outside. The paintings come into being as a means to know her mind and therefore to manifest, and in turn know, an aspect of herself through the work – to become through making.

Krista Louise Smith (b. 1986, Ontario) is a Canadian-born artist living and working in Brooklyn. She received her BFA from OCAD University (formerly the Ontario College of Art and Design) in Toronto in 2010, and in 2014 an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art, where she was a NYAA Merit Scholarship recipient. Smith has conducted residencies at the Leipzig International Artist in Residence in Leipzig, Germany, at Byrdcliffe Artist Colony in Woodstock, New York, and at the Art Students League Residency at VYT, Sparkhill, New York. She is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation for the Arts Grant, and has also been awarded the Ruth Katzman Prize.

Merve İşeri (b. 1992, Istanbul) lives and works in London. She graduated from Politecnico di Milano in Communication Design in 2014 and has since been living between London and İstanbul. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Milan, Istanbul, Miami, Chicago, Brussels and London. Her first solo exhibition Her Brain is a Travelling White Bullet with Ballon Rouge Collective in Istanbul in 2017 initiated her work into the international contemporary art world. Her second solo exhibition with BRC As a Chance Meeting was in 2019 in Brussels. Most recently, her work was shown at NADA art fair in Miami in December 2019. İşeri’s work has been published in The Financial Times, Harper’s Bazaar Turkey, the Huffington Post, and in Artforum’s social media. This exhibition marks the first time İşeri is showing in New York, following an artist residency at Carvalho Park.