Subject to Change
Swivel Gallery is delighted to present "Subject to Change," a three-person exhibition showcasing the works of Abigail Lucien, Nickola Pottinger, and Tami Soji-Akinyemi. Embracing the forces of flux and fragmentation, each artist brings their three-dimensional work to life through energetic improvisation. Their labor-intensive processes involve reimagining fractured pasts and incomplete stories, resulting in speculative rearrangements that blend diametric elements. Here, hybridity finds strength in unpredictability: change is not only the subject matter, but also the process through which these artists readily express their visions.
Tami Soji-Akinyemi’s textile assemblages are driven by a fascination with subjective truth. Her process endeavors to make the fabric of everyday life visible by tearing against it. The artist positions herself as both the builder and the destroyer, or caught somewhere between the two by enacting analogical “truth telling.” Pocked with holes, these ruined linen surfaces offer forensic evidence of incomplete and unstable narratives; wherein text becomes an abstracted series of punctures that are open-ended, double-sided, or hollow. Making use of the material world to invert our understanding of the “real,” Soji-Akinyemi’s surface perforations also become points of access, integral to her process of finding a makeshift refuge.
Throughout their protean body of work, these three artists invite viewers to reflect on transitory phases of life and the perpetual state of evolution that shapes making. Disregarding conventional codes of object production, they demonstrate how new forms emerge under the pressures of societal, political, and personal change. “Subject to Change” thus presents an alternative archaeology, in which Lucien, Pottinger, and Soji-Akinyemi excavate materials and divine new meanings. Together, they re-assemble a future of cultural multiplicity, forging seemingly disparate parts into a home.