
Group Show
NOW I AM A LAKE
Project Info
- 💙 Public Gallery
- 💚 Rose Nestler
- 🖤 Group Show
- 💜 Public Gallery
- 💛 Public Gallery
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Now I am a lake: Curated by Rose Nestler, Installation view, Public Gallery, London, 2022
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Veronika Pausova, Untitled (Skeletal Buds), 2022, Oil on canvas, 45.7 × 38.1 cm

Now I am a lake: Curated by Rose Nestler, Installation view, Public Gallery, London, 2022

Monsieur Zohore, I Was Perfect, 2019 – 2022 Mixed media on towel, mirror, 60 × 58 × 58 cm

Now I am a lake: Curated by Rose Nestler, Installation view, Public Gallery, London, 2022

Chris Oh, Hollows (detail), 2022 Acrylic on wooden burl slab, glass mirrors, 74 × 52 × 6 cm

Now I am a lake: Curated by Rose Nestler, Installation view, Public Gallery, London, 2022

Asma, Love’s An Imagined Body Which Contains No Substance (detail), 2022, Platinum silicone, banak wood, 108 × 34 × 6 cm

Now I am a lake: Curated by Rose Nestler, Installation view, Public Gallery, London, 2022

Catherine Telford-Keogh, Low Life (Pitted Orange), 2022_2

Now I am a lake: Curated by Rose Nestler, Installation view, Public Gallery, London, 2022

Asma, Love’s An Imagined Body Which Contains No Substance, 2022, Platinum silicone, banak wood, 108 × 34 × 6 cm

Now I am a lake: Curated by Rose Nestler, Installation view, Public Gallery, London, 2022

Saelia Aparicio, Miss James Riley (detail), 2021, Welded powder coated steel, hand-blown glass, found object, ceramic, 175 × 36 × 27 cm

Now I am a lake: Curated by Rose Nestler, Installation view, Public Gallery, London, 2022

Alex Anderson, Excision, 2021, Earthenware, glaze, gold luster, 53.3 × 43.2 × 5.1 cm

Now I am a lake: Curated by Rose Nestler, Installation view, Public Gallery, London, 2022

Maria A. Guzmán Capron, Para Ti, 2022, Fabrics, thread, batting, acrylic stuffing, acrylic, spray paint, 111.8 × 106.7 × 10.2 cm

Saelia Aparicio, Fruit Bowl, 2021, Terracotta, found mouth blown glass, ceralun, 24 × 25 × 29 cm
Public Gallery is pleased to present Now I am a lake, a group exhibition curated by New York based artist Rose Nestler.
“Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.”
– Sylvia Plath, excerpt from Mirror (1961)
In this poem, Plath’s mirror takes the form of a shiny and exacting truth-teller, reflecting back the image of her aging face each day, swallowing her youth in its watery mouth. The everyday act of looking into reflective surfaces to check oneself is age-old and matter of course. Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1972) documents a city named Valdrada, built so high above a lake that the inhabitants exist simultaneously with their reflection: “nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat.” The characters cannot lose themselves – even in their most depraved acts. Technology has enhanced our self-awareness – we stare into our phone, a screen that is at once a Valdrada and an echo chamber. Never before have we been so obsessed with our reflection and the images we leave behind.
For this presentation Nestler unites a diverse range of media, from formal representations of mirroring that traverse the visual language of reflection and symmetry, to more abstract points of view: discombobulated bodies, twins, two flowers admiring one another, reproductions of masterpieces on found objects, a bleach-dyed towel taking the form of a swan, a sexually-transmitted virus encased within a puddle of resin and abstracted mirrors illustrating the color filled abyss of imagination itself.
Narcissus in all of his drowning self admiration is used as a cautionary tale against the dark shadows of vanity. But there is resistance found in seeing oneself if unbound from the chains of morality and politeness; a joyful power in standing out, getting dressed and performing oneself. The works included all carry the literal and metaphorical ins and outs of living amongst a world of reflective surfaces confronting our mortality and exploring its depths.
Public Gallery