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Hunter Shaw Fine Art

  • HSFA is now TORUS
  • NEWS
  • EXHIBITIONS
    • Brody Albert: Empty, Except for the Ghost
    • Don Edler: A Nightmare on the Brains of the Living
    • Feigning Death: Sessa Englund & Andrew Rutherdale
    • NADA NY 2023: Ánima Correa
    • Let The Experts Argue
    • Ánima Correa: Ambergris
    • Very Quiet: Michael Kennedy Costa & Benjamin Reiss
    • Mrs. Jug: Hatchling
    • Dustin Metz: The Fruit
    • Klammern aus denen Blätter Sprießen 2
    • NADA NY 2022: Adam de Boer
    • Alan Shields: Tweaking The Grid
    • Klammern aus denen Blätter Sprießen
    • Panteha Abareshi: This Is Not A Body
    • Cara Chan & Don Edler: Deep Time
    • NADA Miami - Don Edler
    • Sam Rowell: Dissolving The Sky
    • Evangeline AdaLioryn: The Pearl Eater
    • Rollin Leonard: About Face
    • Sessa Englund: Fool's Errand
    • Tarik Garrett
    • Don Edler: Devil You Know
    • XX:XX
    • Molly Surazhsky: PPE • People's Power Enhancement
    • Colleen Hargaden: Strategies for Inhabiting a Damaged Planet
    • Reality Is Canceled
    • Tammy Nguyen & Adam de Boer: Facing New Axes
    • Adam Higgins: Flatfish
    • "I'll see you in the ether" curated by Jonny Negron
    • Don Edler: Two Minutes To Midnight
    • Molly Surazhsky - Mashacare: Home of the Freaks, Misfits, & Weirdoes
    • R. Lord, Harry Gould Harvey IV, DJ Richard - The Institute for Chaotic Love & Healing
    • Suzan Pitt: Joy Street
    • Filip Kostic: Landgrab the Musical in Virtual Reality
    • Mara De Luca: LIGHTBRIDGE
    • Sam Rowell - Persistence of Vision: Luminous Flux at the Event Horizon
    • Adam de Boer: Traveller's Palm
    • Rupture of Plane: Alan Shields + Mimbres Painted Pottery
    • Corpus Alienum - Don Edler, Hayden Dunham, Amanda Vincelli
    • SPRUNG!
    • Claire Colette: Widening Circles
    • Adam de Boer: Night Swimming
  • CONTACT
  • ACTION
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Sessa Englund: Fool's Errand

April 27, 2021

Sessa Englund : Fool’s Errand
May 16 - July 4, 2021
Thursday - Sunday 11am - 5pm and by appointment
5513 W Pico Blvd. Los Angeles 90019

Hunter Shaw Fine Art presents Fool’s Errand, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Sessa Englund. In this selection of sculptural works, the artist explores impermanence through a visual language of domesticity and the body. Sites of somatic intimacy - furniture, food, jewelry - are abstracted into hybrid forms suggesting a liminal realm in which the body has merged with its surroundings. The sensitive materiality of these objects further conveys a state of intermediacy: rusted metal, burnt marzipan, latex, and dried flora inhabiting an entropic ontology of continuous flux. At once vulnerable and austere, Fool’s Errand elicits the melancholic pathos of a time-distorted memory.  

Throughout the exhibition, Englund incorporates a generic adolescent iconography: trolls, hearts, flames, and butterflies mass produced in endless variation and sold to signify identity. The artist often deploys these motifs through techniques of body modification, adorning objects with piercings and stick-and-poke tattoos. As an ethos, the practice of body modification acknowledges the transient nature of the body while asserting agency over its material and form. Recorded in altered flesh, memory is made visible. This is evident in a series of floor-bound sculptures resembling rugs of skin. Augmented with custom body jewelry and tattoos, their biomorphic surfaces are raised in furcated patterns suggesting roots, veins, or mountainous topography. Cast in latex, they have the texture and appearance of weathered dermis, and like the biological material they evoke, are in fact encountered in a state of slow, continual aging and disintegration. 

A suite of rectilinear constructions recall a spartan living space. Cabinets, sofas, dressers appear fragmented and reduced, as if in a state of materialization or disassembly. Stripped of their functionality, these skeletal forms frame empty space, pointing to the void within matter. Intrusions of cast glass in tones of foggy white and spectral green punctuate the edges of the wooden structures. These blocks conceal murky impressionistic forms at once luminous and vague like years of memory embedded within a household object. This uncanny domesticity imbues Fool’s Errand with a psychological climate of tenderness and dread, while expressing the existential reality of impermanence underlying all that is manifest.

Sessa Englund holds a BFA from the School of Art + Design at SUNY, Purchase NY (2013). Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include All made of tender flesh, all put together, Haul Gallery, Brooklyn NY (2019); Wild Objects with Alicia Adamerovich, Project Pangée, Montreal Canada (2019); A suspended state in last, Guest Spot at the Reinstitute Gallery, Baltimore MD (2018); Sympathy for trolls (artist in residency presentation),, East of Elsewhere Gallery, Berlin Germany (2018). Recent group exhibitions include From Dallas to Baum Bridge curated by Anna Frost, LA River, Los Angeles (2020); Beast On Its Back curated by Anna Frost, Canyon Canyon, Los Angeles (2020); Games of Ceres, King’s Leap, Brooklyn NY (2018).

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