Exhibition Details

Counting down to 2022, Objective Gallery together with Friedman Benda presenting Misha Kahn's first solo show in Asia - Startling the Echoes. This exhibition will open from Dec 31, 2021, to Mar 6, 2022, at our Shanghai space. "During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time sketching objects in virtual reality. In a way, it was like relearning to draw – rather than reflecting a 3d form as a 2d sketch at its genesis. You could draw it immediately into this blank abyss that visualizes the third dimension. I think the easy thing to point out about this is the freedom of building in a space that doesn't have gravity or structural concerns or even any materials other than essentially blank voxels. But to me, the striking difference was the surrounding. I was over at a friend's apartment the other day and they were pointing out how the skylight in the airshaft to what was, once upon a time, James Turrell's apartment, felt a bit like one of his pieces. People always think this is absurd, that artists' output isn't as simple as the stimuli around them. But, often the magic of seeing an art studio is the ability to see this ebb and flow of visual information from the surroundings diffuse into the work and back into the space again. But in VR, in this space that's designed to feel almost like a total void, what is the output? The "studio" in this virtual world is a never-ending expanse, to keep track of where your work is are thin lines of bounding boxes and a gentle fog. The experience of spending all this time in this void is singular - meditative and removed from the present but totally free. Getting to present this work, I wanted to bring people into this "studio" - an alternate reality version of objects shown on worktables with smudges of paint or wood shavings lying about. This is the work conjured in the void-free to exist outside of a trajectory of history and the magnetism of logic. The objects are lucid and floaty, any moment where they grasp at a reference is a hazy image through the fog. Being a Gemini I like when shows have two parts - and the other part shows my impulses towards the tangible stubborn world of materials and objects. Grounded by a big sofa, "Pig of the Earth" - this room puts forward exploration of the fringes of different modes of production - hand-built sofas, metal cast on casual tin foil molds, … I'm not sure what else is in this room… It's the antidote to appareling into a void, something more like putting your face in moist dirt," says Misha Kahn.