BALTIMORE, MD.- Springsteen is presenting Holding Patterns, a solo exhibition by Amy Stober, marking her solo debut. Holding Patterns alludes to a moment of stasis, the pregnancy of stillness. A plane suspended in flight, waiting on the go-ahead for landing. In stillness or perceived immobility there exists a process borne of latency, anxiety, calculation.
Obsessively process-oriented, Stober catechizes the given in favor of the exceptional. How to pervert forms and conceptions? Basking in the autogenous gives way to a universal spirit. Look within to implore without. Presuppositions fall away as new understandings of essence metamorphosize. Stober is meticulous, presenting objects charged with potential, memory, the interrogation of time, and presence.
Her practice is deeply rooted in the processional, a creative digestive tract. She begins by inputting two of her own images in Dreamscope, an artificial intelligence program which transforms photos into mangled recreations. A quick Google search of the app yields bulbous and grotesque images of politicians, landscapes, and animals all suffering aesthetic upheavals in service of the new. Stober rejects this supposed end goal and attacks her images yet again, by hand painting the neural network’s productions onto various paraphernalia. This reproductive methodology is her very own encryption tool.
She establishes a collaborative relationship with the virtual, while maintaining staunch footing in the material world by physically painting her array of vessels. These are containment devices, markedly sentimental, diaristic. She largely renders these works in acrylic, though painterly casting material proliferates. The latter substance yields unruly lines, this where an abstraction of brushstroke is activated.
Stober understands her own information by organizing what could be taken-for granted as imminent. She contends that her process underscores “repetitive personal archivation [as] a comprehension tool,” “a visual approximation for memory recall.” By casting her objects, Stober freezes them in time, allowing one to behold a calculated limbo. - Reilly Davidson
Amy Stober (b. 1994, New Jersey) currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD. She earned her BFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Interstate Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Underground Flower (Perth, Australia), 891 N. Main (Providence, RI), Catbox Contemporary (Queens, NY), and Resort Gallery (Baltimore, MD).
