The final two-person show at their current location, after hours gallery is pleased to present 𝙒𝙀𝙏 𝙒𝙊𝙊𝙇, an exhibition of new works from Audrey Hope and Lila de Magalhaes. Hope offers a series of sculptures conceived as a single body entitled “Disappointed Tourist.” Small in scale, the sculptures are grounded, pierced, and enveloped by lost-wax cast bronze bases, both supporting and disrupting forms that combine canvas, plastic, photographs, fur, paint, beads, and found objects. de Magalhaes offers a pair of figurative pencil drawings of a woman and a horse, as well as felted wool wall works referred to by the artist as “gardens.”
The dialogue between these works can be traced back to 2016 when Hope and de Magalhaes flew across country to contribute to the staging of another artist’s work for the Miami fairs, entwining practices and delighted psyches for the first time. WET WOOL, through a logic central to this show, can be seen as an extension of that trip: an experience, transmuted into something left behind, something remembered, something born.
Journeys — the space between what is sought and what is found, the psychological frontier of discovery, the ineffable nature of the human experience — suffuse this show, felt in individual works presented by Hope and de Magalhaes, and heard in the whispers between them.
The show’s title points us back to the physical result of these journeys: the exhaustion of a sheep sweating beneath their coat; dewey tufts caught on a barbed wire fence; or shorn wool, transformed for human use, odorous after being left in the rain.
—Jess Camacho