180
RED HOOK, NYC
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MERCY CLUBHOUSE
CREIGHTON BAXTER & AGNES WALDEN
3/07/25 - 4/07/25
CREIGHTON BAXTER & AGNES WALDEN
3/07/25 - 4/07/25
The unobstructed view is of her mouth, through the nearest castle wall. Every analogy in the air between her and I invokes feudal power or romanticized ruin. Two gestures make a surface. Her eyes are holes. Her towers are blurred, softened like they’ve been bruised. She stares through herself as two forms, more of a castle than a woman, more of a mask than a palace. Mercy Clubhouse is behind her. In the spire she would take aim at her enemies, throwing rotten fruit and coffee at men. Her mouth would open for the whole world to fly out. She’s about to say something I won’t like, and what I say in response won’t matter. Ribbon archways, landscape or hole or door. Two girls arriving together usually have a good shot. Noise and then flowers. Noise and then somewhere to stand. Noise and then women, or butterflies, or sentences. The subject is two people communing as the walls of comportment collapse. Mercy Clubhouse might lend permission to reach and fold and grin. The clubhouse beckons a particular tenor. They come here because they’re like this all the time. Linear medieval gazes, dividing pages and directing motion, bridging space, spirit, and motifs. Making something together is more fun than making something alone. It’s not rocket science. Her drawing hand is sharp and continuous like speech. She draws with diction. She repeats until something in the utterance cracks open. Even in small ways like the burying of a face’s expression by blacking out the eyes. She had to realize that each figure is not alone, and that these women’s accumulated parts are meant to make up a whole that she also can’t see. She deepens the space around them. She makes sandcastles that never get wet or blow away, but feel fragile enough that they might. She draws real wet and decisive. She picks up where we left off to cross us out for the sake of something bigger between friends. She finds herself looking around the floor when we draw and everything she has touched is left to dry, balancing somewhere, curling under its own heft and viscosity. Placed in the shade in a row, like tree cuttings not yet grafted. She shoves a turkey leg into the flower vase. She quickly conjures subjects in places that usually simmer. She never quite settles into drawing or writing until confessing something about the week, relationships, reading habits, recent griefs. It’s like a first concrete gesture, not as subtle as the experience of getting to know herself silently through drawing. She appears quiet but her laugh is loud, even after the executive orders. She talks about sex a lot, surprisingly so. Two is enough for a clubhouse. A room with no walls. A band with no instruments. No password needed. Mercy is a fact one drops into. Mercy Clubhouse must be the place inside these drawings. Can we demand mercy? Or must mercy be lateral? We prefer demands that suffering end. I would never ask a billionaire for mercy. We map mercy in formal, material, spatial, or collaborative valences. To both be at the mercy of the other – handing power back and forth in the closed circuit. Two batteries in a flashlight.
thirty six point eight hours
dana karwas
5/02/25 - 7/11/25
Using the repetitive movement of the pendulum,
a primal feeling takes over.
How do we know where we are?
How do we tune our antennae to the intuition frequency?
a primal feeling takes over.
How do we know where we are?
How do we tune our antennae to the intuition frequency?
SPILL 180 is pleased to present Thirty Six Point Eight Hours by Dana Karwas. Thirty Six Point Eight Hours considers the collective consciousness of the cosmos and our place in it through the lens of movement. By combining popularized scientific imagery with a mechanical eye anew, the exhibition asks: in the chaos of placing oneself in our universe, does sensory perception serve as a mirror, mirage, or echo? What happens when we lose the anchors that bind us to reality, while we remain acutely aware of their presence?
In Thirty Six Point Eight Hours, Karwas positions a pendulum embedded with an eye at the center of the gallery. The pendulum swings in a repetitive pattern over a well-known image from the James Webb Space Telescope—an image that, to Karwas, oscillates between the biblical and the banal, at once divine in magnitude yet flattened into the status of a cool screensaver. Functioning as both a cosmic messenger and an animate creature, the pendulum encodes movement into patterns, tracing connections between terrestrial and celestial motion. It invites visitors to engage with an expanded visual field, tuning their own antennas to memory and personal interpretations of the vast unknown.
These acts of spatial tuning draw from the speculative and intuitive dimensions of scientific exploration, sensing the unknown through micro-movements, while sharing visual sentiments from early sci-fi cinema and storytelling. Affordances such as videos, prints, and sculptures expand the installation through the gallery and are injected with Karwas’ own play on a collective cosmic psyche that sits at the edge of an event horizon of understanding.
The process of Thirty Six Point Eight Hours was created as a human response to the disorientation that arrives alongside profound discoveries in modern science. Karwas, fascinated by the spectacular absurdity of how we attempt to grasp the incomprehensible, documents these discoveries and translates them to be more accessible to the mind and body. This is a reassuring outcome for Karwas, one that she hopes to pass along to those who encounter her work. The exhibition takes its title from the duration required for a Foucault pendulum to complete one apparent rotation at Spill 180’s latitude—a process that makes the Earth’s motion visible through an elegantly minimal gesture, assuming you have the patience to watch a pendulum for thirty six point eight hours.
Credits:
The research for this exhibition included the Pendulum Study 2.0 developed collaboration with the Yale CCAM Ultra Space Lab and CCAM Ultra Space Fellow Wai Hin Wong.
Glass Blowing with Mike Lanzano
Printing with Griffin Editions Brooklyn
Framing with Lamount Photographics NYC
Source Image: NASA James Webb Telescope
DOLIOLIDA
RACHEL WOLF
1/31/25 - 3/05/25
RACHEL WOLF
1/31/25 - 3/05/25
I held onto this idea, but it bled in a way that things relating to nature do. My work tends to be aquatic in aesthetic. I sway towards creating objects that could be species. Objects that levitate between flora and fauna. As the wire unfolded into form it took the shape of a dome– domestic enough not to resemble the sky, but to resemble a jellyfish or the underwater view through goggles as you look up and see air weighing down the sea. Seeing the ocean from below creates silvery film that traps our visions. This inversion is like seeing the constellations from above.
Doliolids are ovular plankton which end in two siphons. They are non-picky grazers with coincidental consumption, who levitate between flora and fauna. I found their structure and saw more of my piece in a doliolid than in the sky. However, like the atmosphere, doliolids are strainers, selecting what stays on the inside and creating new compositions on the outside. Weaving from below, I decided what they absorb and what they expel. The wire skeleton mimics celestial coordinates and bind constellations. As if the atmosphere is a digestive system and the stars have stayed to be absorbed within our dome.
Rituals of Recursion
Aarati Akkapeddi
1/11/25 - 1/25/25
Aarati Akkapeddi
1/11/25 - 1/25/25
I developed a computer program that allows me to translate text into Kolam designs. Kolam (in Tamil) or Muggu (Telugu) is a traditional art form from South India. Kolams are auspicious drawings on the floor (usually at the threshold of the home) using rice flour. Kolams are traditionally made by women and created before sunrise. They comprise mathematically complex patterns that feature continuous intertwined lines.
To encode text into Kolam designs, I first translate each character into eight-digit binary codes (made from only 0s and 1s). I then use an algorithm to map this translation onto a diamond-shaped matrix of dots. The algorithm moves top to bottom and left to right, drawing loops on each dot that correspond with either 0 or 1 according to the binary code translation of the text. The algorithm connects these loops, making sure to never connect loops associated with “0” to those associated with “1”. The center of the matrix contains blank padding space, allowing the entire pattern to be distributed evenly on the matrix, preserving the perfect square/diamond shape.
I started working with kolams because I wanted to translate my grandmother’s name, Swarajyalaxmi, into a kolam as part of a reclamation of a mourning ritual after her passing in 2022. My family mourned my grandmother by invoking three generations following a patriarchal line (my grandmother, her mother-in-law, and her mother-in-law’s mother-in-law). In contrast, I worked matrilineally, creating three kolams representing Swarajyalaxmi, Kameswaramma (her mother), and Rajyalaxmi (her grandmother). I draw the kolams signifying their names while simultaneously playing audio from an interview with her a month before she passed away at age 101. The audio shows how my grandmother’s name signifies independence in the colonial context, and the interview also highlights her resilience in the face of patriarchal oppressions such as being married at age twelve.
In this exhibition, I expand on this work by incorporating new letterpress printed works created using a set of 3D-printed kolam monotype blocks. There are kolams for my grandmother, her mother, and her grandmother but I also include letterpress prints that extend the process beyond familial connections. There are kolams commissioned by friends honoring their loved ones, kolams honoring martyrs, specific places, and some that feature messages of resilience and resistance. In these works, I see the act of translation as a ritual of reverence. Each kolam becomes an invocation and an offering. I invite all to spend time with each kolam and decode its meaning.
Together, these works explore the recursive nature of identity: names containing histories and personal stories intertwining with collective memory.