Anthony Hawley
Geograpologies (Gore-chewer, Drone-catcher, Night-dredger)

June 23, 2023–July 21, 2023
Reception: Friday June 23, 6–8pm

Performance program:

June 23, 7:30pm: The Afield
July 7, midnight: Negroni Afterparty with video piece by Nat Castañeda
July 14, 8pm: Scarcity
July 20, 7:30pm: Aakash Mittal, Lesley Mok, and Fay Victor

Digging your toe into the dirt, you find a fossil. You take it home, wash it, and at night notice a subtle glow. It’s a fossil, but covered in Monster, or drenched in highlighter ink.

Anthony Hawley’s bright green laser-cut plexiglass sculptures are something like this—ancient and contemporary, playful and dire. In material and color, they are reminiscent of the aesthetics of youthfulness and spaces designed to fuel social energy. But their creature-like shapes also point to some distant past of scaled and feathered things, or the near future, where imagined beings and projections will inhabit the realm that will follow and swallow our toxins and ecological waste. “Contagion, critter, data dust” is how Hawley describes the work’s temporalities in a text that accompanied an earlier presentation of related work. 

Some of these sculptures that glow under black light on the walls of the gallery seem to share the form, symmetry, and habitat of winged creatures that flit in the dark—moths or bats. If not made of plexiglass, they are made of mylar with grommets along the edges, recalling kites (something else designed to fly), and equipped with headphones that hang down like the wing tails of a moth. Other pieces are more abstract, amoebic, or graphic, hinting at their source image: gusts of wind on an old map dating to the origins of America.

Associated concepts: amorphousness (of wind and other elements), shifting (of continents and their conceptions over time), and layering (of the earth and our debris over time). These are themes of the subtle sonic elements that emit from the sculptures’ headphones in the gallery. Hawley created those tracks using samples of drone recordings, sounds contributed from collaborators and publics, and scores inspired by the map. Several performers have also been invited to reinterpret those scores over the course of the exhibition. These sounds in combination with the black light create a dreamlike or clublike space, in which the sculptures seem like bugs flitting across the walls or pulsing icons for visual meditation. Look closely enough and you’ll find that these creature-forms also carry text, onomatopoeic fragments or words related to time and mapping, engraved into their backs as if they were headstones for our era.

Phosphorescent green may be associated with underwater creatures, cave-dwelling things, aliens, glow sticks, sticky hands, and safety gear—nature when we’re not looking as much as parties and emergencies. It’s goopy; it’s toxic; it’s extra-terrestrial; it’s ten cents at the arcade. A sense of discovery and delight is important to this work’s creation, in the way that a folded piece of paper, cut into a shape, becomes sculptural once unfolded, or in the way that a small map opens up into a projection of a world. Breathe it into life, like music. Here is a cosmos, carried on the back of a moth wriggling its way out of the dirt.

—Mira Dayal, June 2023.

Anthony Hawley (b.1977) is a New York City-based multidisciplinary artist whose hybrid practice spans video, drawing, installation, writing, sound, and performance. He has exhibited nationally and internationally with notable solo projects presented by the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series (NY) (2020); The Salina Art Center (KS) (2018); Spazju Kreattiv (Malta) (2016); Vox Populi Gallery (PA) (2014). In 2016, CounterCurrent, The Menil Collection, and Aurora Picture Show collaborated to produce his five-day multimedia performance work “Fault Diagnosis,” engaging audiences across the city of Houston with live performance, projections, a 1985 Nissan Pulsar NX turned micro-cinema, and audio narratives via a GPS-triggered app. He is a MacDowell fellow (2023, 2012), and has also been awarded residencies at VCCA, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Art Farm, and Avaloch Farm and Music Institute among others. Hawley is the author of two full-length collections of poetry and his poems and essays have been published widely. With violinist/vocalist Rebecca Fischer, he makes up the duo The Afield, which recently performed at The Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center (2022), Carnegie Hall (2022), and Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn (2020). He holds degrees from Columbia University and the School of Visual Arts. This is his first exhibition with the gallery.

This exhibition was made possible in part with support from MacDowell, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Betsy Bobenhouse, Rodney Lister, and Robert & Victoria Sirota.