Daffy Scanlan & Chiara Ibrah
Toy Temple Human Monk
November 10, 2018–January 6, 2019
Reception: Saturday November 10, 6–9pm
organized by Dana Kopel, with gratitude to Charlie Markbreiter
Auditorium filled by sulfuric odor. Confrontation of inner banners. Evidence of overturning baby-cells. Trash fire blurs free embers on the mat.
Meanwhile, Chiara Ibrah and Daffy Scanlan are bombarded by unrelenting apocalypse dreams. They see people trampled to death by shredding cleats, disintegrating during transportation, decrepit while weighing little. Plagued by visions of decay and rebirth, Scanlan and Ibrah give agency to the space that exists between these two extremes, creating a map by which the monk should navigate his toy temple. In doing so, they bombard viewers with the promise of a confrontation that someone traversing an unfamiliar landscape might endure. As if cracked over the head by an iron pipe, the viewer bears witness to a memory distilled from the artists’ nightmares, and must drag themself upon hands and knees through the metallic carnage that drapes the gallery space, punctuated by doom and beauty. The linearity of such a journey, however, remains obscured by abstraction—resolution shattering like shards of glass, glimmering sacredly to tantalize the viewer.
One feels obligated to approach the work skeptically, with the caution of someone that has tasted devastation. Flung inward by the inertia of solitude, one is forced to understand their own humanity through the scratched lens of the landscape swirling around them.
—Daffy Scanlan and Chiara Ibrah
Daffy Scanlan is an artist from New Jersey and currently based in New York. Her work explores the transportation of antiques through time and space, paying tribute to the neglect and ultimate disembodiment of un-new objects. She combines cracked and broken textures with antiquated color stories, creating portals into a canon of abuse and trauma. Under the moniker Drumloop, Scanlan collages micronized bits of language with piano and digital synthesis to create sonic representations of her internal universe. Her debut EP, Revenge Body, was recently released by Sweat Equity.
Chiara Ibrah is a visual artist based in Brooklyn. Allegorical imagery and visual puns are recurring motifs in her multimedia work, for which she combines contrasting mediums to further the visual narrative. In much of her recent work, she dissects themes of love and loss in order to draw parallels between those opposing forces.
Dana Kopel is an independent curator and writer, and the Senior Editor & Publications Coordinator at the New Museum in New York. She has curated exhibitions at Knockdown Center, New York; AA|LA, Los Angeles; Celaya Brothers Gallery, Mexico City; and elsewhere. Her writing appears in publications such as Art in America, Flash Art, Frieze, and Mousse.