Fever Dream

Palo Gallery (NEW YORK, NY) is pleased to present Fever Dream, a group show bringing together eight artists whose practices interrogate, dismantle, and expand the traditional concept of the archive. Curated by Gallery Director Sascha Lewit, the show will feature works by Sebastian Ore Blas, Zion Estrada, Paulina Freifeld, Andrea Orejarena, Richard Prince, Danny Sobor, Atticus Wakefield, and Amin Yousefi. Fever Dream intends to frame the archive not as a stagnant historical repository, but as a living, shifting, and contested site of contemporary storytelling.

Referencing Okwui Enwezor’s Archive Fever, the title of the show calls to his writing and the general sense of informational deluge that often accompanies archival research and work. At the center of how information, societal narratives, and mythologies are organized, collected, and published is the archive. Often framed as a neutral entity, this exhibition explores the inherent biases prevalent in the archive. A contested site where power and authority continuously centralizes itself through the control of history. The show provides an opportunity to explore the role the arts play in this archival power struggle for authorship, ownership, and accountability.

The artists in Fever Dream approach the archive through non-neutral lenses, recognizing the preservation and recording of history has never been neutral, while acting as archivists in their own right. Working across film, photography, installation, drawing, and painting, each artist’s practice draws upon literary, familial, academic, aesthetic, and socio-political records to reclaim and generate narratives encompassing all people’s history, not just one point of view. The works will be displayed to emulate the feeling of walking into someone’s personal library, mimicking a variety of information laid out for all to explore.

“Finally, the work in question is archival since it not only draws on informal archives but produces them as well, and does so in a way that underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private.” - Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, OCTOBER Issue 110, 2004

Archival artistic practices are not a new notion, rather to the contrary. Looking at the use of photography in Richard Prince and Lorna Simpson’s respective lens-based practices that each pull from various pop-culture and media, to film-based works by Arthur Jafa. Artists in the exhibition such as Amin Yousefi and Richard Prince incorporate the act of re-photography to make vastly different socio-political statements. Yousefi’s series Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth offers a take on the post-Iranian revolution world, whereas Prince looks to mass consumerism, materialism, and advertisements as commentary on pop-culture. In a similar vein as Prince, the sculptural-video piece by Andrea Orejarena, American Burger, explores motifs of overconsumption in America through a continuous use of media that connects nationalistic ideas to symbols, thus the burger. Whereas her other exhibited series, I Love You Like the Moon, brings a more natural exercise to the floor, looking at the connection between femininity, nature, and the moon cycles which incorporate archival NASA images of the moon.

In Ore Blas, Freifeld, and Sobor’s works we see the influence of photography on each of their practices. Ore Blas brings a contemporary perspective to the table by incorporating scenes from his domestic life into his compositions, though his practice is rooted in themes of magical realism. Freifeld’s painted and transferred imagery directly pulls from generations of family photographs. In theme of images, but combining personal and found, Sobor references a, specifically Eastern European, website archive of old advertisements and video stills and abstracts those images by placing them into contemporary scenes from his camera roll.

“…how does one undo this violence? How does one tell a story about those who left no written record, or whose records are strictly the accounts of their subjugation?” - Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, Issue 26, Vol. 12, Number 2, 2008

Everyone is complicit, whether purposeful or not, in creating the record of information that will inform how this era is archived. The histories that we learn, from the political to the artistic, are only made possible because of their recording in archives. Zion Estrada’s debut mixed-media installation Grief Box 48, grief is reframed not as an ending but as a living, material archive of connection across cosmic, neurological, and socio-historical scales. Incorporating aspects of one of our oldest archives, the elemental table, with creative fabulation, Estrada’s piece confronts collective grief through an interdisciplinary lens. Conversely, Atticus Wakefield’s gesturally abstract drawings draw on Baroque-era visual languages, utilizing direct imagery and styles from that era to form opinions about the human impulse to control natural elements and order.

Archive as storytelling, as a contemporary record, as a historical account, as a living entity that shifts and changes to adapt to the current sociocultural landscape. Fever Dream aims to create a space for people to think about the ways in which their lives are embedded in archival practices, be it through their own camera rolls, research, social media accounts, writing, our notes app, and even financial transactions, that when looked at as whole, make up our contemporary archive. Fever Dream is a conversation, a dialogue between the artists, the artworks, and the viewers; a space to have conversations of accountability, of ownership of history, of materiality as a physical document of time, of storytelling, and of intergenerational connections.