DOOMSCROLL

PRACTICE Gallery is Pleased to Present: Kate Stone: DOOMSCROLL September 6 - September 29, 2024 Opening Reception First Friday, September 6th, 6-9 pm The Stone Tape Theory, a Victorian era pseudoscientific explanation for paranormal phenomena, speculates that architecture records energy or impressions and that these recordings are responsible for haunted houses. Of all the domestic trappings, carpet is by far the most retentive. Like a sponge, its fibers suck up moisture, dust, skin, food, bodily fluids - all the things of life. Specific moments in time are recorded forever in dark stains and crunchy spots. If petrification is the process by which porous, organic material is replaced by inorganic minerals, Kate Stone’s sculptures imagine a reverse process. Here, carpet absorbs so much residue of life that it is animated into a growing, living thing, a ghostly record of human existence. Doomscroll invites viewers into an immersive domestic space occupied by a seated figure that doomscrolled for so long that they were enveloped by their environment, taking the form of a shag cocoon, a plush stalagmite. The installation combines sculpture, animation, light and sound to explore the anxiety and cognitive dissonance that occurs as we consume the horrors of the external world from the (dis)comfort of our living room sofas and how the states of our minds and our bodies are reflected in and absorbed by the spaces we occupy.