CODE ART FAIR
GROUP SHOW
AUGUST 31 – SEPTEMBER 3, 2017 | COPENHAGEN, DENMARK
The Mine was pleased to present a group show at the second edition of Code Art Fair in Copenhagen, with the participation of Johnny Abrahams (b. 1979, US), Yasuaki Onishi (b. 1979, Japan), Farnaz Rabieijah (b. 1981, Iran) and Nastaran Safaei (b. 1984, Iran). The artists used various mediums and methods, such as bodies pressed into fabric, plants hard-pressed into paper and glue pressured onto the wood for the creation of various series of prints, along with a series of experimental paintings.
Abrahams, Onishi, Rabieijah, and Safaei manage to translate their selves in this show. The artists found themselves standing at similar junctures, and what emerges, unfurling luxuriously onto paper, canvas, or wood, like a long-dormant shoot, is a feminized interiority and a sense of connection, both to nature and to the outside world.
In her Body Impressions series, Safaei uses her own body to make marks on textiles. Unlike the full-body prints of Jasper Johns or David Hammons, the body is not depicted but only intimated, with smears and swooshes that might be a shoulder or perhaps a knee but remain unclear. Spidery skeins of dots, connecting body parts to each other, sometimes trailing off over the page with a tentativeness that directly contrasts with the assertive intensity of these body prints.
At the same time, in Rabieijah’s Spinning Plate series, plants are pressed into paper to leave beautiful deboss-like indentations. But unlike pressed and preserved plants, the botanic matter is then removed and discarded, leaving only the void behind, like a trail of perfume left behind after someone has forever walked away. Onishi, in his series Plate of Pressures, used the same dark glue that was chosen for an earlier monumental and three-dimensional installation, applied with a glue gun on wood panels, leaving different layers of traces in the work and illustrating the material transformations of the world and the transition from phenomena to concreteness. Abrahams, in his series Haptic Trajectories, experiments with ideas and practices of printmaking with his edge-to-edge patterned lines, drawing a progressively finer language of elements. Using the waviness of watered silks and the render errors that you might get when taking a photo of a screen, Abrahams pictures a series of processing failures that result from the limitations of hardware – camera sensors, that trick the eye into perceiving afterimages of colour where there is none, create the curious sensation of getting screen-burn from acrylics on canvas.
