Shapes from the Extramundane

Soldes is pleased to present Shapes from the Extramundane, a collaborative exhibition by artist Brody Albert and poet Sara Ellen Fowler. Their exhibition features sculpture and site-specific poetry that explore the extramundane, the generative tension between the everyday and the out-of-this-world. In poetic theory, a “nonce form” is a poetic form invented for a single purpose or occasion. Shapes from the Extramundane proposes an exhibition as a nonce form. In its commitment to a singular occasion, the exhibition emphasizes the lived experience and ephemerality of co-created meaning. Sara Ellen Fowler’s poetry praises, accosts, or summons its readers. Offramp Contrapuntal is composed of words that may be read as either verbs or nouns. Arranged as two interdependent columns of text, this poem frames the 110 freeway offramp through the window of the gallery. Fowler’s other monostiches, or one-line poems, dilate in size and intimacy as they navigate the gallery’s architecture. Tonal modulation across these fragments are meant to create eddies of emotion or conceptual pockets. In Brody Albert’s artworks, discarded objects have been meticulously recast in the language of sculpture. Ephemeral moments discovered in the built environment are rearranged and hardened in epoxy, plaster and wood. Albert’s sculptures propose new functionalities — a birdbath, a sundial and a philosophical object. The extramundane gestures towards what is too great or exceptional for this world. Albert points to the overlooked, that which has been refused or spit out-of-this-world. His sculptures twist these two extremes into contact, offering glimpses of the exalted through the dross of the everyday. Here’s the invitation: Meander near shapes and the forces that shape them. Read in public. Text someone about it.