July 2 - July 12
An installation by Gosia Koscielak
curated by Raul Zamudio
The Sweet Hereafter is one-person exhibition of the Polish multimedia artist Gosia Koscielak. While the exhibition's title is both a reference to the film by director Atom Egoyan as well as a euphemism for death, The Sweet Hereafter is neither morbid nor does it concern itself with cultivating an aesthetic of fatality. Rather, it is a visually poetic meditation on the human need for constructing meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. It unpacks what may be construed as a sinister colloquialism and re-configures the inevitable, not as Edgar Alaan Poe's horrific "meeting with worms," but takes an organic approach to mortality as being part of a larger humanistic, holistic horizon.
The Sweet Hereafter artistically articulates this through its myriad new media strategies and conceptual maneuvers: the exhibition space is engulfed with a large video projection of a serene and endless ocean that is a metaphor for the ever-expanding human consciousness. This is poetically reinforced by another video projection from the ceiling onto a pile of salt on the floor. The effect of the video sculpture links it to the projection, while the LED signs/sculptures on the wall emit writing of poets on the subject of death that reassures us of our humanity in the face of our existential dilemma |
