Habitat / Namsal Siedlecki

TOAST Project Space presents Habitat, an exhibition from Namsal Siedlecki, curated by Toast Project Space, on 16 September 2020 at 7pm.

The main feature of the exhibition is the Wayfarer, two identical statues within a galvanic plexiglass tank, faithful reproductions of one of the ex-votos of Clermont-Ferrand, a cloaked human figure catalogued in the museum as a Wayfarer. The two sculptures are made from fused zinc, the metal having been created from the fusion of some twenty-two thousand coins that had been thrown into the Trevi Fountain.

The sculptures are completely immersed in liquid, one in front of the other, and attached to two brass bars that sit across the tank. The sculptures are forced into a perpetual exchange of matter, every three days the polarity of the galvanic tank is inverted so that one sculpture loses matter to the other. Then, over the following three days the sculpture that had received matter slowly gives it back, continuing in this way ad infinitum.

Each time the metal is deposited it ends up in a different place from before, this means that the two sculptures will be in continual transformation. Two sculptures that were created as finished objects but which will now be in a perennial state of transformation. Two desires coexisting within their native element. A sort of breath of life that will gradually modify them. A closed system, a habitat where two elements for which movement is intrinsic, the coins and the wayfarer, are fused together in an infinite electro-chemical conversation.

Namsal Siedlecki

Namsal Siedlecki (born Greenfiend, USA, 1986), lives and works in Seggiano (GR). In 2019 he won the 20th Cairo Award and the Club GAMeC Prize, in 2015 he was awarded with the 4th edition of the Moroso Prize and the Cy Twombly Italian Affiliated Fellow in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome. In recent years his works have been in exhibition at numerous institutions, including: Patan Museum, Kathmandu; MAXXI, Rome; Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato; Galeria Boavista, Lisbon; Villa Medici, Roma; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; American Academy, Rome; Museo Apparente, Naples; Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, Venice; Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; Antinori Art Project, Bargino; Galleria Magazzino, Rome; ChertLudde, Berlino; Galeria Madragoa, Lisbon; Galleria Acappella, Naples; Frankfurt am Main, Berlin; In Extenso, Clermont Ferrand; Very Project Space, Berlin; Cripta747, Turin.

www.namsalsiedlecki.com