Opening Reception: Friday, June 28 from 5:00 - 7:00pm
Minnesota Street Project, Room 204
1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco

re.riddle is pleased to present Dips, a group exhibition of work by Emelie Luostarinen, Riley Payne and Sahra Jajarmikhayat curated by The Place. The opening reception will take place on Friday, June 28 from 5-7pm at 1275 Minnesota Street, #204, San Francisco. The exhibition runs through July 27, 2024.
 

“It is better to go to the beach and think about painting than it is to be painting and thinking about going to the beach.” —Agnes Martin 
 

Martin’s aphorism is about commitment: one must fully attend to art, but also to the world from which it is made, in this case, the beach. Anyone who has visited the picturesque ruggedness of Northern California’s coast understands that the crashing border between land and water is both an absorptive experience of looking and feeling. Crumbling cliffs, stinging windswept sand, and frigid spray pushed by exorbitant currents make the beach a place of contemplative conjecture as much as reckless abandon. First looking at the water is enough, then that act of looking becomes bodily, and finally, you close your eyes and dip into the wave. If you do dare to swim, you must first commit to dip. 

To dip is to give in to abandonment, an act of tentative submersion. It is also, colloquially, a furtive exit. That promiscuous slippage between full bodily commitment and sudden egress is the theme of this show: it is better, to paraphrase Agnes Martin, to dip from work to take a dip at the beach. 

Each of the artists in Dips, an exhibition curated by The Place in conjunction with re.riddle, proffer immersive surfaces, and spaces as templates of wonder and reflection. In Lane 4 (big wet), Emelie Luostarinen (b. 1987, Stockholm) has simulated the dimensions of the central lane of a competitive swimming pool in a ribbon or polyester mesh and aerosol, a banner of shared space rippling in the gallery between Riley Payne’s oil paintings and Sahra Jajarmikhayat’s sculptures.  Like Martin, Luostarinen swam competitively in her youth. Each swim begins with a dip.

Payne (b. 1979, Melbourne) taught himself to paint in oil in 2020 after years of working meticulously in graphite. His large canvases of ravishing surfaces are flecked with wry optimistic sparks, wittily melding medium with message. Liquid reads as viscose oil paint, a current that ripples through all of his work on view.

Looking in and looking at depends on where we see ourselves. Systematized forms based on organic contours explored through different media begin Jajamikhayat’s (b. 1990, Tehran) Land-Escape series in glass, ceramic, and pigmented canvas installations. Deeply moved by the sublime experience of looking into a volcano and seeing molten rock roil like liquid, Jajamikhayat produces shapes that resurface through repetition into new sensory encounters. Ice-cold glass comes from red hot fire. 

In our Anthropocene present, fixing our sites towards sublime waterscapes prompts a deeper awareness of our own precarity and the breathless fragility of the earth itself. Never a stable escape from reality, art is an intensification of it: demanding emphatic ingress.  As we have learned through bracing experience on the beach, even the smallest of dips can trigger big change. Dip in, then dip out, energized. 

- Ted Barrow x Josefin Lundahl (The Place)