Retiring the Attic

Tilling is pleased to present “Retiring the Attic,” a two-person exhibition by Chloe Seibert (Queens, New York) and Sarah Fripon (Vienna). The exhibition comprises drawings and paintings produced between 2021 and 2022. Both Fripon’s and Seibert’s practices exist as something, that is, as Ursula K. Le Guin writes, “not science fiction, not fantasy, yet not realistic.” It is important to define this shared ethos; trying to understand a world without logic through the practice of world-making is a difficult undertaking. This is made especially true amidst moments of crisis, or when on one’s own. These artists participate in the disintegration of boundaries — of multiple worlds, human and inhuman, corporate stock images and personal mementos. Their work exists in the tiny sliver at the very centre of a Venn diagram. Seibert produces an achromic scenography inhabited by canines that feel at once familiar and brand new. These dogs engage in overtly mundane human multitasking — texting while walking, having sex while watching television. It’s in this probing of the soft line between what we deem to be our world and that of the outside that these drawings exist; in the division between the absurd and normality. A laptop sits atop a plastic milk crate in the almost filmic scene, striped tube socks pulled up one of the dogs ankles. Both of Seibert’s contributions of ink on paper employ one-point perspective, further collapsing the rules of our universe and pulling us into the artist’s own. Grabbing at a zeitgeist, Fripon’s paintings embody a glossary of the contemporary moment. Her images feel like an index from an imagined reality, constructed of careful, blear layers. She collects these moments from visits to friends' homes, while flipping through shopping catalogues, or during walks throughout the city. Fripon takes the world largely as it is, while imbuing it with a new sense of preciousness and obscurity via reproduction, collage, and embellishment. These paintings act as slow documents, “quot[ing] certain elements of the room,” collected images cast in thin layers of acrylic. The works converge in a shared language: of world-building, of response to crises through absurdity, and of subtle humour. It’s in this language of the night that we come to situate ourselves, sifting between their duality. “You cannot keep filling up the attic with mess. Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all the have the same mutual enemy, sterility.” Sarah Fripon (b. 1989, Zeitz, Germany) is an artist based in Vienna, Austria. She graduated with a B.A. in Fashion Design and a master’s in Fine Art from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work has been shown at Taxispalais Kunsthalle Tirol (2019), Palais Liechtenstein Vienna (2020), and Fünfzigzwanzig Salzburg (2021) among others. Chloe Seibert (b. 1989; Queens, NY) lives and works in Queens, NY. Solo exhibitions include No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH; Mickey, Chicago, IL; Queer Thoughts, New York, NY; COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY; and ASHES/ASHES, New York, NY (currently on view). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY; SUNNY, New York, NY; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Karma International, Los Angeles, CA; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; Balice Hertling, Paris, France.