Return to Sender

To send out something. A signal, a word, a letter, a message. To send yourself somewhere, to be sent somewhere. „What do you mean? I don't understand you." A dictionary, a snapshot, a touch. Message received. No, wait, message undelivered. To be returned to sender. Please top up your package. Fill up your luggage. Roll up the fabrics, and all the devices. A splash of water. Where you walk, where your shadows are moving, where light reflects. Light reflecting back from the water, lights reflecting on screens. It is dark! Is it charging? Is it lost in translation? Type it in, send it, draw a fine line on the screen. Draw a screen with a line. The line continues and winds itself around you. The phone rings, the waves roll back, we meet for the very first time. Antonia Rodrian and Simon Bongard are spending 3 months in Istanbul with the Artist Residency Atelier Galata by Kunststiftung NRW (Art Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia). In their exhibition "Return to Sender" at Non Sight they are showing works they produced during their stay in Istanbul. The show includes paintings, drawings and digital prints. Both their works linger between observation and fiction, figuration and abstraction. Antonia is showing a series of paintings, which are connected to each other by recurring forms and contents, playing on color and metamorphosing objects, as well as small drawings. Simon focused his production on digital drawings. He is showing black and white sketches – quick impressions of lights, shadows, and structures of his surroundings – as well as more dense observations using vector-based graphics, grit patterns and layers to create an image. The title of the show, Return to Sender, refers to the alluring but strange stage of being sent somewhere unfamiliar to work, where things might get mixed up or lost, or not be received as intended. It can be read as missed messages or tangled up communication – mirrored visually in Antonia’s painted, maybe dysfunctional screens. Or reflections on digital signals – as in Simon’s drawings being produced on a tablet and sent through a printer. It also alludes to them returning to a place they know and have been before, Istanbul, creating a small personal time travel for the duration of a few months. While in Simon’s works the possibility of an infinite zoom lets the viewer see the underlying abstraction of an image, in Antonia’s paintings the abstraction comes from bending the familiar object into repeated shapes and dissolving or reassigning the attributed characteristics. The show includes images of waves, images as light waves and paintings of light waves, floating back and forth like water, blurring the line between sender and receiver, reflecting between color and the absence of color, the composition and the reception of an image. But all the above might be a misinterpretation... When not in Istanbul, Antonia and Simon live and work in Düsseldorf, Germany.