another side of the moon

Langdon Graves’s “Spooky Action at a Distance.”

Opening on Friday, May 20th at Victori + Mo in New York City, New York is artist Langdon Graves’s (Previously on Supersonic) solo exhbition “Spooky Action at a Distance.”

Channeling our abiding fascination in the occult into surreal visions and explorations into the ephemerality of memory, “Spooky Action at a Distance” assembles a wide-ranging inquiry into the unknowable.  The show’s title - Albert Einstein’s reaction to the curious phenomenon of quantum entanglement - has been claimed by both science and occultists, interpreted by the latter as a suggestion that not all aspects of life and death are visible or knowable.

The drawings and sculptures featured in “Spooky Action at a Distance” take as their starting point scenes from first-hand accounts of ghost stories told by the artist’s grandmother, as illustrated by her childhood imagination and memory of them. They speak in a blend of domestic fragments from her grandmother’s home, and imagery borrowed from a variety of traditions and rituals involving death and the afterlife, including the spiritualist practices of séance and spirit communication; funereal objects; and ancient symbols of death and rebirth. Building on Graves’ formal tendency to insert negative space throughout her subject matter, these images and objects are incomplete and removed from their context, and so approximate the inevitable clouding of memory; they offer stand-ins of the familiar and impressions rather than distinct representations.

“Spooky Action at a Distance” will be on display until June 26th, 2016.