Opening Reception
Wed, Oct 30, 2024
SculptureCenter is pleased to present the first institutional exhibition in the United States of artist duo ASMA, on view Oct 31, 2024, through Feb 3, 2025. Their sculpturally-rooted works stretch the possibilities of materials such as silicon, resin, bronze, steel, or glass, often blending artisan craft techniques with synthetic and industrial processes. Their research methodology integrates intuitive responsiveness to a site with conceptual explorations found within the arenas of mythology, psychology, and posthumanism, viewed through a metamodern lens.
For their SculptureCenter commission, ASMA presents Ideal Space for Music, a shattered narrative tapestry with sculptural characters whose presence evokes theatricality. Drawing on the metaphorical capacity of SculptureCenter’s lower level as a place of subconscious nature, works in the exhibition will open a conversation around desire and fragmentation.
ASMA explores the relationship of desire with the development of language and written literature through the image of joint articulation and within the symbol of ball-jointed dolls (BJDs, as they are referred to by their manufacturers). In BJDs, the sphere becomes a place of contact, a point of conjunction and separation, simultaneously becoming symbolic of the object of desire triangulating between a lover and the loved. This triangulation is echoed in the creative process, where objects, like the sphere, become the intermediate vessel between the desire for expression and the one for consumption. The exhibition will feature a newly commissioned series of reflective sculptures, detailed with low-relief compositions. Accompanying these works, a group of dramatic sculptural stagings featuring constructed characters will revisit the Frankensteinian notion of disintegration, evoking themes of contamination and hybridity in the process of self-becoming.
Fractured representations of the body manifested historically in the emergence of puppets in avant-garde artworks such as those by Hannah Höch or the dolls of Hans Bellmer, as well as performances from the Theater of the Absurd, where the human body was often alienated, distorted, or constrained. In both instances, it was a response to the context of horror and perversion within human conflict that was taking place at that time. ASMA’s exploration coincides with the current resurgence of dolls in popular culture as a psychological environment for coping with the contemporary nightmares of collective trauma.
Through their surreal and dreamlike approach, which draws inspiration from elements such as the ornate motifs and embellishments typical of movements like art nouveau and romanticism as well as artifacts of digital civilization, ASMA's projects increasingly border on total environments. Their SculptureCenter exhibition expands on this interest by fully engaging with the labyrinthine and obscure corridors of the lower level and the architectural character of the building. Their works will create a subtle environmental direction towards the performative stage by injecting the area with a psychological ambience and amplify it with lighting and sound. The exhibition furthers ASMA’s research on contemporary emotional-psychological conditions concerning selfhood, transformation, and our relationship with nonhuman realms.
ASMA: Ideal Space for Music is curated by Jovanna Venegas, Curator.
ASMA is a Mexico City-based artist duo formed by Matias Armendaris and Hanya Beliá. Their work uses allegorical figures and evocative architectural spaces, exploring formal interrelations between painterly and sculptural expressions. They employ fictional narratives that include forms of nature interwoven with psychoaffective contemporary landscapes. As a result of a collaborative process, the work focuses on hybrid and polluted forms, both in a material and conceptual nature. They explore a nostalgic revisitation of the past through a metamodern lens that oscillates between critical discourses of identity and belonging and ornate formal explorations of beauty.
ASMA’s recent solo exhibitions include Inverse Sátiro Envy I & II, PEANA, Mexico City; Blind Sun Rests in Desire, Everyday Gallery, Antwerp, BEL; The Last of Animal Builders, Edith Farnsworth House, Illinois, US; Wander & Pursuit, House of Gaga, Los Angeles; Vermin Gloom, Project Pangeé, Montreal; Vain Kisses to the Source, Deli Gallery, New York; Janus, Embajada, San Juan, PR; Half Blood Princess, PEANA, Monterrey, MX; Blossoming Carcass, Make Room, Los Angeles. Recent group show exhibitions include Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail, Denver Art Museum, Denver; OTRXS MUNDXS, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; and Anima Mundi, Manifiesta 13, Marseille, FR.
