LOS ANGELES, CA.- Kopeikin Gallery announces Belt Friction, a group exhibition of new works by Bjarne Bare, Jordie Oetken, Bridget Mullen, Malcolm Oliver Perkins, and Ellen Schafer curated by Arden Surdam.
Belt Friction presents a set of works that refuse to define a singular notion of touch. Intimate, aggressive, intentional, consensual—each artist offers pieces that transgress the conventions of contact and undermine our compulsion to categorize. This conflation of touch exists at a point in time in which the parameters of human contact have been established, violated, and established again. And yet, instead of further contributing to this conversation, these artists bring ambiguity and disruption to the exchange by their framing, mark making, scale, and reproducibility, reminding us that contact is never clear.
Touch most undeniably begins with Jordie Oetken’s Untitled, which tightly frames an indistinguishable hand dunking a female form. The back of the submerged figure is smeared in an earth colored red, too muddy to be blood, but disconcerting enough to emphasize the wickedness of the gesture. In order to make these photographs, Oetken acknowledges that it was necessary to create “circumstances that forced constant renegotiations of control.” We observe that the act depicted is brutal, but the care of a manicured hand placidly resting atop the woman’s head subverts our understanding of the allegedly cruel touch.
Belt Friction refers to the friction force between the surface and a belt such as the tension created by a strap wrapped around a post. This force increases with each revolution much like the stiffly wrapped dock lines depicted in Bjarne Bare’s Outboard Swaddle #7. Akin to a discarded body bag, Bare’s photograph is reminiscent of a Mapplethorpe bondage polaroid, alternating between hypothetical pain and vicarious pleasure that feels excruciatingly present in a mere inanimate object. Much like Bare, Ellen Schafer’s sculptures speak to and of a body no longer present. However, Schafer hints to a memory of her own corporeal presence through tender imprints and manipulations of sneakers cast in silicon propped on space saver shoe organizers. With indexes of a single form, Schafer embraces the loss of the artist’s hand through replication, enabling touch to transition into trace.
This idea of trace reappears in Malcolm Oliver Perkins’ deceptive paintings. Finding space within abstraction for loosely figurative elements, Perkins’ portraits are painted on black glass allowing the viewer’s reflection to be visible. This doubled image (portrait & person) creates a non-consensual collaboration between the artist and observer, raising questions of agency and permission without ever exerting physical contact.
Ultimately, Bridget Mullen’s playful paintings return us to the most traditional form of touch, in which the artist’s brush is an extension of the hand. Her repetitive figures stretch across the canvas, seemingly moving forwards and back, reminding us that it is possible to be in two places at once. And by renegotiating these interpretations, Mullen like her peers insists on clouding expectations, allowing us to imagine touch as trace, touch as memory, or even anti-touch.
