But it’s the lake that attracts me, as if I were a seagull… – “The Seagull”, Anton Chekhov

Seagulls comprises work from Nick Bastis, Cara Benedetto, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, Douglas Huebler, and Jill Magid. Its central critique arrives by adherence; the works’ in the exhibition reflect states of anger, violence, depression, humor, exhaustion, escape, and intimacy with confinement. Hermaphroditic snails hibernate on gallery filing cabinets in Bastis’ work; Benedetto’s conglomerate images of half-inspired graphic mundanities flip with the celebration of the erotic benefits of artworks and other types of art work; Henkel and Pitegoff project a Berlin community that could be anywhere, were it not for the transient friends moving out of frame; Huebler’s cynical art world mantra, “The Peaceable Kingdom”; and Magid’s two uni-directional neons, which, seamlessly protruding from the gallery’s walls, illustrate exercises by which killing has been conditioned by means of physical distance. Politics derives of an admixture of necessity and proximity, a friction that circumscribes varieties of community, and propels these cities that never cease. However, as our urban centers grow, concepts of self-selection monopolize space, resources, and attention, they quickly become policy, then rigid fact. And so, to look at Bastis’ molluscan torpor, Benedetto’s erotic corporate self, Henkel and Pitegoff’s demystified labors, Huebler’s lacerating grievances, and Magid’s desensitized combat, is to read a poetics of political embeddedness. Let us be monopolized for the sake of our friends. Fuck you New York, we live in each others heads.

– Sam Korman, June 2015