Petal, Fortress, Blood and Evening Star
January 11th to February 17th
Olga Abeleva, Andrea Lukic
With a text by Najma Eno
Exhibition Text: Footnote, Najma Eno
TAP is proud to present Petal, Fortress, Blood, and Evening Star, a duo exhibition by Olga Abeleva and Andrea Lukic, with an accompanying text by Najma Eno. In Petal, Fortress, Blood and Evening Star, the world-building seems idyllic on the surface but soon fades into darker revelations. The picture plane is approached cinematically - each image is a screenshot from a horror film that will one day be made. In an exercise of speculative narration, the characters are afforded a degree of autonomy and traverse between the works, freely.
In Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, the fictional town of Macondo faces a plague of insomnia that spreads through a lollipop business, leading to catastrophic consequences. As the disease engulfs the town, people lose their memories, identities, language, and awareness of their existence, sinking into a shared dream world.
Petal, Fortress, Blood and Evening Star draws inspiration from this theme, exploring the horror of language breakdown and historical amnesia. Lollipops symbolize the unintended consequences of seemingly innocent actions, emphasizing the interconnectedness of the individuals and the community.
Abeleva and Lukic's works are brimming with dream symbolism, harrowing reality, lethal life lessons learned from fairytales, ominous apparitions, cross sections, 80’s malls, piles of jewels, and a stroke of lightning.
About the artists:
Olga Abeleva is a visual artist, writer, and costume designer born in St. Petersburg, Russia, living in the Tiohtià:ke/ Mooniyang territories. Her painting practice resembles a soap opera: there are recurring characters, splintering narratives, and cliffhangers. Some paintings are autobiographical, some take on rumours and coincidences, and others build on literary mirrors and dreams. Working through fractured narratives, the paintings sculpt a theatrical space, where an unreliable narrator tells the constantly fluctuating story.
Andrea Lukic is a Yugoslavian-born interdisciplinary artist, who is based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her work focuses on surreal, fantastic, absurd, alchemical, grotesque visions, sounds, and cognitive forensics. In 2016 she founded Symphony of Fire, a submission-based music-to-video/video-to-music festival. She has been publishing material under Exhausted Monologues for 17 years, presently a graphic sci-fi serial soap opera entitled Journal of Smack.
Credits:
Metal Frame:
Terrance Richard
Curtain Assemblage:
Lili, Sine, Steph, Lenore, Kate, Nadya, and Zoey
For further information or press inquiries, please reach out to contact@tapartspace.com
