David Castillo Gallery is proud to present Dark Flow Lurking, with works by Anna Betbeze, Sanford Biggers, Kate Gilmore, Valerie Hegarty, Pepe Mar, Melvin Martinez, Fabian Peña, Gamaliel Rodriguez, Xaviera Simmons, Shinique Smith, Frances Trombly and Brenna Youngblood.

The artists in Dark Flow Lurking are dogged by their art historical reflections, reencountering the Mirror Stage on every surface and in every critical conversation. They understand ontology is its extrapolation and annihilation as a transfer of gravity. For Bataille as well as Dark Flow Lurking, “it is possible to assume that the object of any affective reaction is necessarily heterogeneous.” Dark Flow Lurking digests both the picture plane and liminal shuttle as windows into outer spaces. The artists point to new bodies of work like black holes rendered visible by the spiraling gas of a neighboring star.

Sanford Biggers condenses mark-making and linear history into matter like a star, also a frequent symbol on pre-Civil War quilts such as those that Biggers appropriates. Shinique Smith solidifies the conceptual thread of objects through the diagrammatic of native and popular cultures.

Anna Betbeze, Kate Gilmore and Pepe Mar object-orientate process. The materials of Betbeze’sGhost, construct the painterly act, treating a Flokati rug with plaster and paint. In Gilmore’s Break of Day, wood and ceramic sculptures disorientate the pedantic gaze. Mar’s Revival II is a medicinal tabernacle for what ails hegemony.

Fabian Peña, Melvin Martinez and Xaviera Simmons animate a subjectivity like a periperformative utterance, such as I promise, engenders not only a stated I and an implied you, but an unnamed witness. Their artworks promise new semiotic forms. Peña’s vast light box intervenes upon the linear reading experience with gossamer insect wings, texts and everyday objects. In Martinez’sPentimento, is a tragicomedy of geometric formal beauty that sees the iridescent properties of chaotic heterogeneity and falls in love. Simmons’ The Arctic Dusk is a corporeal dictionary of nomadic vocabulary.

Gamaliel Rodriguez shares the object-orientation of Dark Flow Lurking by painting a reverse trope of sympathetic nature in which architecture mirrors the cloud of an ominous explosion. On the scene of Frances Trombly’s painting, hand-woven canvas becomes an object with a gravitational will of its own. Brenna Youngblood, who reclaims materials from a childhood home, and Valerie Hegarty both situate the object as a portal into other dimensions of space and time.

In his essay, “What is it like to be a bat?” Thomas Nagel critiques reductionist modals of consciousness. Dark Flow Lurking is composed of artists whose constant reminder is that one must become the Other in order to understand its sentience; enter a black hole to know its contents; re-territorialize notions of abstraction, figuration, landscape, structure, materiality and labor to paint speculative corporeality after the millennial turn.

Anna Betbeze
Valerie Hegarty
Melvin Martinez
Fabian Peña
Gamaliel Rodriguez
Frances Trombly
Brenna Youngblood