NEW YORK, NY, February 8, 2022 | PALO Gallery is pleased to present Kim Faler: Double Bubble, the artist’s first New York solo exhibition, featuring the celebrated immersive installation of the same name most recently exhibited at MASS MoCA as part of the Fall 2021 exhibition Kissing Through A Curtain. This is the artist’s largest gallery installation to date and marks an integral step for the artist contemplating sound as sculpture. The gallery will host a public opening reception at 57 Bond Street in New York City with the artist on Friday, February 25th, from 6-8 PM.
At first approach seemingly whimsical and ethereal, Double Bubble seeks to explore recent latent collective anxiety and the weight and manifestations of resulting unconscious emotional struggles, a central theme of Faler’s across interdisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, painting and photography. Faler is known for sourcing content from the quotidien, and questioning the value placed on memories, routines and the passage of time itself.
Originally commissioned by MASS MoCA and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Kohler Co. in 2019/2020, the installation comprises a series of approximately 20 sculptures, suspended from PALO gallery’s 15-foot ceiling, to form the artist’s latest multi-sensorial landscape. Each individual sculpture is a large-scale rendering of a wad of chewed bubble gum, cast in a wide
range of materials including metal, wax, chalk, glass and gypsum among others, unobscured by the accompanying pigment and paint of pastel greens and pinks. As Faler explains, the work explores “the quick and intimate forms which we make with our mouths while chewing gum...I see these forms as visual manifestations of our anxiety, and an illustration of the tension that we have come to reside with.”
The pieces, rendered at the approximate scale of an adult human head and suspended in the gallery—as they were at MASS MoCA—at the artist’s eye level, confront the viewer with their material nature and deeper implications. Sounds emitted from elements hidden in the hollow forms further question the mundane daily act of almost unconscious anxious mastication–both in the literal and figurative sense–now visible, and also audible, on an enlarged scale.
As Alexandra Foradas, Associate Curator of Art at MASS MoCA notes, “Faler’s sculptures attain a sense of false buoyancy, like bubbles fixed at the moment of being blown. As viewers wind their way through the crowd of sculptures, sounds emanate...the sonic language of bubble gum, filtered through the materiality of sculpture.”
