LA MER INSOMNIAQUE Natalie Häusler, Margo Wolowiec & Eric Sidner 30 January 2015 – 8 March 2015 … To be cross-eyed, is to be unable to aim at a singular, unified, point in space. It is a condition that creates destabilizing lacunas in one’s comprehension of the world, a state in which images stretch out sideways, over or away from each other. Between the blind spots two globular psycho-cyclopic visionaries dissociated at birth. Set apart from them, on the other side of a meridian separating excess from absence, an old car cover and a china dog describe a strange levitation. An impoverished, desiring, gestalt has no singular point of origin it can only make for an insensible image, a site of tension between creative misperception and obfuscation. Margo Wolowiec’s hand woven tapestries enact this theatre of the image, in which the sign, the mark and the gesture struggle through the processual repressions of the composition and the network towards the light of the surface; warp meets weft, palimpsest meets palinopsia. Natalie Häusler starts with the word, playing with its capacity to tease a disguise from a disclosure. Her Corals evoke an absent voice, the acoustic reverberations of a poem recited rather than read, whilst the Case Mods play with the enigmatic collaboration between the different ways we can receive and partake in a work. The physicality of the text is abstracted in these works, caesuras become spaces for the body to wander in and out of, between elusive fragments of what lies just beyond the literal or the literary. The strange relationship that exists between silicone, as a material, and the human senses is laid out on Eric Sidner’s table. The gelatinous jewels repel and attract simultaneously, their viscera and surface confused and inseparable. It is the same fake fluidity of the air animating Sidner’s eerily distended polythene, in which the currents make for a dissonant materiality and voluptuous stasis. … Natalie Häusler (b. 1983, Munich) lives and works in Berlin. She received her MFA from Bard College, New York, in 2011. The same year she co-founded, along with poets Ed Steck and Brett Price, the poetry press American Books, and her most recent volume of poetry, A Virus Can Be on a Mussel, was published by Mousse in 2014. Häusler’s recent exhibitions include group shows at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2013), Kunstverein Nürnberg (2014), Kunsthalle Ravensburg (2012) and Museo Nitsch di Napoli (2014) as well as solo shows at Supportico Lopez in Berlin and the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, Hohenlockstedt (both 2013). Eric Sidner (b. 1985, Houston) lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, Städelschule, Frankfurt/M and de Ateliers, Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include Mineral Spirit, Laurel Gitlen, New York and Just 'Cos Always, Circus, Berlin (both group, 2014); Eric Sidner & Taocheng Wang, The Duck, Berlin (two-person, 2014); Eggshell Skull, Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmö (solo, 2013); Until He Says Goodbye, Curl up and Dye, Vienna, Austria (2011); You know?, Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco (group, 2012) and Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt/M (group, 2010). Margo Wolowiec (b. 1985, Detroit) lives and works in New York. She recieved her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2013. Recent exhibitions include solo presentations at Johansson Projects in Oakland, CA and Anat Egbi, LA (both 2014). Wolowiec has lectured at Maryland Institute College of the Arts, Baltimore, MD, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, and was a visiting critic at the Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY. 4 Herald St London E26JT Tel +44 (0) 20 3487 0507 [email protected] www.laurabartlettgallery.com