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    Conversational Spirits II

    Jessica Silverman is pleased to present Part II of “Conversational Spirits,” an exhibition exploring animism – the belief that animals, plants, places and objects can be enlivened by spirits or imminent powers. Associated with the worship of nature and the rise of subordinate souls, animism is a theme broadly relevant to a time in which equal rights, ecology and biochemistry are serious concerns. Animism has long been germane to art insofar as the most compelling objects are imbued with such intention, intensity and energy that they feel alive.

    Artists in Conversational Spirits II
    • Hernan Bas
    • Luke Butler
    • Tammy Rae Carland
    • Martha Friedman
    • Matthew Angelo Harrison
    • Julian Hoeber
    • David Huffman
    • Isaac Julien
    • Takuro Kuwata
    • Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze
    • Woody De Othello
    • Lily Stockman
    • Claudia Wieser
    • Margo Wolowiec
    • Daisy Youngblood
    Animism takes many forms.
    Hernan Bas
    ’s Feeding Time in the Little Shop of Horrors depicts two brothers surrounded by carnivorous plants from Venus Fly Traps to the Pitchers that consume small birds, bats and frogs. Hollywood is not alone in imagining that meat-eating vegetables are possessed by menacing souls. By contrast,
    Margo Wolowiec
    ’s weavings explore the healing powers attributed to silver, a natural antibacterial. Interwoven with images of nature and in monochrome panels, sterling silverleaf threads brighten, lighten and act as a spiritual antidote to calamities of global warming and ill health.
    In the science age, the microscopic and the cellular often take on animistic properties.
    Martha Friedman
    ’s Rubber Drawing lightboxes are highly gestural, almost painterly sculptures, whose use of light nods to photography. Inspired by scientific diagrams by Santiago Ramon y Cajal, one of the founders of modern neuroscience, the works make a double reference to consciousness: they literally depict things such as neurons in a cerebellum and they emblematically seem to dance and breathe like the subliminal figures one picks out of Rorschach tests.
    A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part is made to stand in for the whole, as in the phrase “he’s a “hired hand.” Synecdoches often distill and make more potent the anima or life principle of the whole. In Clinched,
    Woody De Othello
    ’s new four-foot-high bronze, the artist captures a salute to unity and solidarity, a fleeting moment of victory, a plot point in a narrative where they clinched it.
    Books embody ideas, stories and characters. In these large photographs by
    Tammy Rae Carland
    , the form of the physical book appears to have come to life as if it had absorbed some of its contents. These frayed, well-read volumes contain the work of Gertrude Stein, the Oakland-born author and art collector, famed for her relatively open gay identity and lines like “there is no there there.”