"Soft Fantasy / Hard Reality sets out an initial binary: softness and hardness, fantasy and reality. This set of relations can be extended to its cognates: immateriality / materiality, fictive / factual, or even concept / form. The exhibition presents a roster of artists who work across a variety of practices, media, and form: from painting to sculpture, installation, moving image, performance. These artists and their artistic idioms mediate this initial binary, working through the certainty of its polar distinction and proffering instead a more open-ended encounter with, on one hand, what is soft fantasy and hard reality and, on the other, what may be found in between, alongside, or in the wake of unsettling these categories through the performative, the archival, or the mythical. Within this framework, the titular typographic slant–at once cleaving the binary and coalescing the separate categories into a network of differential relations–becomes central in the exhibition’s prospects. Soft Fantasy / Hard Reality leans into this rhetorical slippage which leads us from this binary to these categories’ misrecognition or else troubling. The exhibition itself flags the preciousness and precariousness of this juxtaposition and in its place offers ways in which reality becomes fugitive trace or fantasy constitutes uncompromising matter. "
SILVERLENS | Soft Fantasy/Hard Reality
Silverlens, New York, June 20, 2024
