No Neutral presents the sculptural works of Amanda Atria, Taisha Carrington, Cameron Patricia Downey, Joy Li, Abenda Sohn, Josh Rabineau, A.Y. Wang, and Shellie Zhang. Each work in the exhibition brings the audience into an arena that ties together materiality, history, and form.

In No Neutral, sculpture dances between object and experience; the sudden and the constant; the natural and the unnatural; the multiple and the singular; and the hand and the machine. Through these works, specificity drives cultural materialization, interrogating the ways context adheres to a work, how materials migrate and translate from their points of origin, and what is gained (or lost) in that displacement.

In Blinking Eyes, Flickering Heart, Joy Li draws on found objects to amplify how vulnerable bodies move through a highly commercialized world where desire is continuously produced. With a similar attunement to material culture, Cameron Patricia Downey peers into the private lives of objects, where she finds instruction in the incidental, the precarious, and the misremembered. Dione, Daphnis archives and transforms the everyday into an altar.

For many of the artists, objects bear multiple stages of life and geography. In Untitled #2 Ventilation, Abenda Sohn examines themes of loss and the emotional struggles one faces when returning home after many years. While Sohn evokes a previous place, Josh Rabineau evokes a previous self. Rabineau’s Little Mister Bitch anchors the aesthetics of childhood and the decorative arts in solid metal sculpture. This recontextualization conjures both resonance and repulsion.

Amanda Atria and Shellie Zhang approach form and surface as reciprocal mechanisms through which industrial, cultural, and personal histories are transformed over time. In Inc., Atria investigates processes of material transformation and the expressive, cultural, and formal resonances embedded in industrially manufactured objects. Zhang’s Flush Blush Bruise No. 3 explores how histories of translation, migration, and memory leave traces and impressions.

Both Taisha Carrington and A.Y. Wang are driven by nature as a device for analyzing the political. Carrington’s Mothership/board, Mother (4) accumulates invisible matter around us as a means of visualizing the movement of people and the geopolitics of the Caribbean region in the face of climate and fiscal vulnerability. A.Y. Wang describes the commodified body as a symptom of political institutions. In Covercrop, Wang presents the decay of buckwheat as a necessity for regrowth. The pool of oil stands in for a derailing power that looms over the collective body of the buckwheat.

Collectively, these works offer sites of active negotiation. No Neutral invites viewers to consider how meaning is continually produced through the shifting relationships between objects, bodies, and the worlds they inhabit.

Text by Taisha Carrington and A.Y. Wang.