September 5, 2024 - October 16, 2024

Earth - Stars

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 5th, 5-8PM Gallery Hours: By Appointment on Saturdays, 12-3PM

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Specialist presents Earth-Stars, new work by Brooklyn-based artist E.E. Ikeler. 

“No longer does the dream reveal a blue horizon. The dream has grown gray. The gray coating of dust on things is its best part.”

–Walter Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism” from The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

In Walter Benjamin’s short and strange essay “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism” he claims that the Modern subject’s inner life has become as mundane as the things that populate his physical world. His unconscious desires—symbolized by dream objects that are superficial and cheap—have become banal. These dreams, in turn, determine the scope of his waking life. “Dreams,” Benjamin reminds us, “have started wars.”

Benjamin opens by evoking Heinrich Von Ofterdingen, the protagonist of Novalis’s eponymous novel fragment (circa 1802). Novalis (pen name of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) died at the age of twenty-eight; the unfinished work was published posthumously. In the novel, young Heinrich, having never left home, dreams of an enchanting blue flower–sometimes with a face. The motif recurs throughout the story and functions as a symbol of his search for divine poetry and true love. The “blue flower” came to be a larger symbol–that of German Romanticism. As such it represents a deep and sorrowful longing for something eternal but unattainable. 

Earth-Stars features four new paintings by E.E. Ikeler–the product of the artist’s own kind of searching–alternately perilous, sentimental, and transformative. Meticulously cut-out flowers scatter across the painting’s surface like faraway stars. Imagery of moons, constellations, and Platonic forms comes from the artist’s personal archive, sourced from historical spiritualist publications, cosmogenic diagrams, star maps, and graphics made by new age “seekers” and Flat-Earthers. The works employ a range of materials: collage, industrially produced pressed-flowers, paint, 3D printer filament, and resin.

Accompanying the paintings are several works on paper. Created as a part of the artist’s studio process, these works are made from laser-printed images of the paintings in earlier states, which the artist then alters with paint and collage. Some of these drawings precede changes to the final painting, while others show alternate endings and other absent or unfinished works from the series. 

E.E. Ikeler (b.1986) received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008 and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2016. They are a member of Essex Flowers, an artist-run gallery in Chinatown, NY. They’ve had solo exhibitions at Hemphill Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.), Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson, NY), Mulherin (Toronto, Canada), and Kent Place (Summit, NJ). They’ve also exhibited at Pazo Fine Art (Kensington, Maryland), EFA Project Space, Abrons Art Center (NYC, New York) and Yve Yang Gallery in Boston, MA. Ikeler is a Lecturer in Painting at Boston University. They live and work in Brooklyn, NY.